A Salary Cap You Can Believe In

We heard President Obama say pretty starkly that the enormous Wall Street bonuses were outrageous.  While I stop short of government dictating compensation to private businesses, I do put the Wall Street clowns in the same category of the Big Three auto CEOs flying to Washington in their private jets looking for handouts.  Very bad form.

The more I pondered the idea of salary caps, whether they were fair or not, whether it was government taking away another liberty, it finally hit me, that this just might work.  So I now propose a salary cap, on the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. And why not?

Who Got Us Into This Mess?

It was the housing bubble that triggered the financial debacle.  What drove the housing bubble?  Let’s start with Fannie and Freddie.  They were created by Congress.  Next came the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to make riskier housing loans.  Next the Clinton Administration under the direction of Janet Reno, drove the banks harder to make more housing loans to people who couldn’t afford them.  Then was the Federal Reserve that kept interest rates too low for too long.  And right up until the end we had Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd saying all was well with Fannie and Freddie.

We have Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee responsible for writing the tax laws, cheats on his income taxes.

Bernie Madoff runs a Ponzi scheme that bilks people out of $50 billion while a guy named Markopolis figured the whole thing out in five minutes and spent the last nine years trying to get someone in government to care.

The government imposes CAFE standards on the auto industry and drives them to the brink of bankruptcy and then says we have to bail them out.

Now they are proposing a “stimulus” package that is just a bunch of pork.

Solution

So I propose that we, their employers, cap their salaries at $100,000 (from their current $162,500) until such time as they fix this mess.  I further propose that if a congressman/woman can prove that they didn’t vote for any of the crap that got us into this mess, that they be exempt from the cap.

What say you?

Tagged as: Barney Frank, Bernard Madoff, Bernie Madoff, Chairman, Charlie Rangel, Christopher Dodd, Clinton Administration, Community Reinvestment Act, Congress, Congressman, Economic history, economics, Economy of the United States, Fannie, Fannie Mae, Fannie May Candy, FAST BUCK FREDDIE, Federal government, Federal Reserve System, Freddie, Janet Reno, Obama, Politics, President, Subprime mortgage crisis, United States, US Federal Reserve, USD, Washington, Ways and Means Committee