Great job by Senator Webb, thank you!
Washington, DC– U.S. Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today introduced the Taxpayer Fairness Act, legislation that would impose a 50 percent tax on excessive bonuses paid by Wall Street banks and other firms that benefited from billions of taxpayer dollars in 2009.
“This is not class warfare,” said Senator Webb. “This is not something that’s going to run the gamut of all executive compensation and bonuses. This is a one shot deal. This is a tax on excessive bonuses of TARP recipients that received more than 5 billion dollars from the American taxpayer in 2009.”
“The Financial Times, a paper dedicated to the free market, editorialized in favor of this position at the end of last year,” continued Webb. “We believe this is a fair and reasonable approach. It offers equity and a level of fairness to the American taxpayers who bailed these companies out.”
“In September 2008, Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke told the Congress that, without a $700 billion investment into the TARP program to assist our major financial institutions, our world was going to go into cataclysmic economic freefall,” added Webb. “Many of us supported that program with the understanding that, if the American taxpayers were putting $700 billion into the system in order to rescue these financial institutions, the American taxpayers would be able to get a return on their investment as well.”
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To read the full text of the Boxer-Webb “Taxpayer Fairness Act,” [click here].
To view relevant charts, [click here].
To read the Financial Times editorial referenced by Senator Webb, [click here].
