Our Byron York caused quite a stir yesterday with his report that congressional liberals led by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-MA, and Rep. Alan Grayson, D-FL, are determined to return to the federal government a kind of power to set private sector wages not seen since the Nixon administration.
Grayson’s Pay for Performance Act of 2009 would give the Secretary of the Treasury authority to set compensation standards, including salaries and bonuses, for all employees of financial companies receiving an unspecified amount of tax dollars under a federal economic recovery program.
Grayson wants to make sure that “unreasonable and excessive pay to employees of financial institutions that are running on taxpayer money” is not supported by the government. You can read his response to Byron, as well as a copy of the bill itself, courtesy of The Huffington Post.
And you should read the entire Grayson response – which is entitled “Stop stealing our money” – because it provides a superb illustration of some of the rhetorical artifices being used by liberal Democrats to justify their obssessive campaign to make Boated, Big Government even more bloated and bigger, regardless of the consequences.
Byron reported that the bill “would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.”
Grayson sort of tries to suggest that The Examiner and Byron somehow reported the particulars of his proposal unfairly or inaccurately, saying in his Hiuffington Post that “the arguments against this bill are fairly predictable. The conservative Washington Examiner said that the bill grants the government ‘extraordinary power’ to set salaries. But the power it grants is pretty standard; the taxpayers are owners, and owners of companies set salaries for their employees.”
Did you catch that sly piece of rhetorical artifice by Grayson? He contends in one sentence that this newspaper said his bill gives the government new power to set salaries, as if that is somehow not true, but then in the very next sentence evasively confirms the accuracy of the description. How else to read that the “pretty standard” power of owners is to “set salaries for their employees.”
That also suggests, by the way, that Grayson thinks all those folks working for the “bad banks” getting federal bailout money became government employees when the tax dollars started rolling in last year. Wouldn’t that then make them candidates for the same Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and federal civil service retirement coveragethat Grayson gets? I suspect that neither Grayson nor Frank would encourage a discussion of that point.
So what’s Grayson’s beef? Judging from his encounter last night with Neil Cavuto, it might be that the Florida congressman has figured out that the wily old Barney Frank used him, a congressional neophyte, to advance an idea that is absolutely alien to the vast majority of Americans.
Or at least to those who lived through the Nixon debacle as C. Jackson Grayson – what wonderful irony names can be – tried to make federal wage controls work. The former Grayson failed, of course, because the government can’t manage private sector salaries any better than it has the Post Office, which is one reason why the present Grayson’s prescription will also come aclunk, as he must know it will.
Anyway, Cavuto pressed Grayson for a number, any number, even a range of numbers, of acceptable salaries for those affected by the congressman’s bill. Grayson simply refused to cough it up, and only conceded that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would be given authority under the bill to set compensation ranges.
Grayson kept going back, over and over again to the basic mantra being used by liberals to justify sociaizing the U.S. economy: “These bad banks have come close to destroying our economy. They did so to enrich the small group of employees who made horrible, and in some cases, illegal bets.”
It’s like a doctor saying “we found evidence of cancer in your foot, so we have to pump your entire body with our most powerful chemotherapy to make sure it doesn’t spread.” If, as seems likely, the liberals succeed in socializing the economy, the operation will be a success but the patient will surely die. — Mark Tapscott, Editorial Page Editor
