Sen. Charles Grassley tells Newsmax there’s an “outrage” at America’s grass-roots level over the huge bonuses paid to executives at financial basket case AIG.
The Iowa Republican, former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and now the ranking Republican on the committee, also said corporate executives receiving “retention bonuses” could be replaced by talent that would work for less – and could do a better job.
Newsmax TV’s Ashley Martella asked Sen. Grassley if, in the wake of the AIG bonus scandal, he has confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
“I think he’s raised a lot of questions about whether or not he’s handling things well, and every time he slips up you lose a little bit of confidence,” Grassley said.
“But he’s been in office two months and I don’t call for resignations after just two months.”
Martella noted that AIG reportedly paid out $218 million in bonuses, $53 million more than it had disclosed, and asked whether Grassley supports the House-passed measure to tax those bonuses at a rate of 90 percent.
“I would vote for the House measure,” he responded.
“But I would also very much support the Baucus-Grassley bill [levying a 70 percent tax on 'excessive executive compensation'] that we wrote at a time when the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was saying that nothing should be done in this area…
“I just returned last night from Iowa, being there Friday Saturday and Sunday, and going to three different events where grass-roots America was represented. Not Republican events, not Democratic events, just common ordinary people coming out to do things.
“And I can tell you that there’s an outrage at the grassroots of my state, and I assume an outrage throughout the entire country, about these bonuses being paid. Not the bonuses per se because I don’t think my constituents mind people being appropriately (recompensed). But you’ve got to remember that they’re working for a company that is underwater. They’re working for a company that has a big injection of more than a hundred billion dollars of taxpayers’ money.
“We have not seen any remorse, any apologies. We’ve not seen or heard any contrition on the part of these people, AIG or any other Wall Street firm.
“They ought to be more contrite than ever before because their company wouldn’t exist presumably without the taxpayers’ help.”
No comments:
Post a Comment