In an Argus articlethat suggests Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin is "irked" at our ballooning debt, she rails against the AIG bonuses:
Then came the news about the appearance of taxpayer-funded bonuses for floundering insurance giant AIG, which has received billions in federal handouts.
"I've been very disheartened," she said about the bonuses recently during a break on Capitol Hill. She cited "many of the concerns that led me to vote against that particular package - the abuses, such as the bonuses at AIG and some decisions at other companies."
Help me out here, but didn't she vote for "that particular package"? Here is a paragraph from the New York Observer today:
In fact, that's exactly what had happened, back in February, when the $787 billion stimulus bill was working its way toward passage. At that time, Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, tacked on an amendmentto the stimulus that applied strict limits to all existing and future executive compensation packages at firms receiving federal bailout money. Wall Street, predictably, was apoplectic—and Geithner rushed to its defense, pressuring Dodd to water down his amendment so that it only applied to future packages. Dodd ultimately relented, the stimulus was passed and signed by Obama, and the groundwork was in place for AIG to cut those fat bonus checks.
The bonuses were provided for in the stimulus bill Herseth-Sandlin voted for. Any clue what she might be talking about, then? I find it hard to believe she could so boldly misrepresent a very public and very recent vote.
Perhaps what she means is that she voted for taxing those bonuses at confiscatory rate. I don't know why one would brag about voting for a bill that, as I argued the other day, is almost certainly unconstitutional (and apparently Laurence Tribe agrees), but perhaps this is what the congresswoman means.
Still, it seems to me that Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin told a whopper today in the Argus. Am I wrong? Let me know if I am.
And by the way, the best way to stop that irksome debt is to quit voting for it. Does anyone buy the notion that taking a few projects out of the stimulus bill seriously altered the fact that it represents almost $800 billion in pure debt, most of it not actual economic stimulus (see my argument here)? And regarding the bloated omnibus spending bill, Herseth-Sandlin argues:
She also joined the Blue Dogs and most of Congress in approving a $410 billion spending bill earlier this month that pushed discretionary spending up 8 percent over last year. It boosts domestic programs that the Bush administration had "starved" over the past eight years, she said.
That spending bill was a non-defense discretionary spending bill. Look at the chart below (which I found here) and tell me that these programs were "starved" under Bush:
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