Government Now Controls Payday

The United States has always had budget issues. The one President Obama “inherited” was indeed challenging, but his administration and the Congress overreacted, made matters worse, and now they claim they are the only ones who can fix it.

In a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” 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.

They are now experts on bank finance, automaking, and if your company took any bailout money, the government will now tell you how much you and your performance is worth.

Of course, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009″ will never apply to our lawmakers. The 1994 104th Congress, passed a series of reforms via the “Contract with America”, the first of which would “require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress”. I believe that one was allowed to expire.

If pay were tied to performance, there would be a lot of broke legislators on Capitol Hill.