A couple brief political rants

[tevarin]

George Bush was misguided, incompetent, and a disaster for America. But he deserves at least a small amount of credit for peacefully and lawfully handing over power to the opposing party. A lot of people thought Obama would be assassinated. Compare to Chavez or Putin (let alone Mugabe or Saddam), and Bush looks pretty good. He might well be the

Comments

[vrimj]

I don't think we could legally take personal wealth from them, but congress could pass a law that would provide a process to essentially black list people from working in baning, finance or insurance if they were found to have violated some standard of care.

[tevarin]

Could you do it via income taxes? i.e. 2010 tax law says that if you received a W2 in 2008 from a company received a government bailout in 2008-2009, you owe an additional $X in taxes, where X is some function of your income, the amount of government bailout money your company got, and the amount the government got back for it's bailout investment.

If you made such a law now, company executives could see what they stood to lose if they failed.

[vrimj]

Sadly no takies-backies is a longstanding principal of common law contract law.

We generally don't like the idea of making people responsible for the behavior of entities they don't control. Would it really feel fair to have a similar law where you had variable tax rates depending on the number of students accepting Pell Grants who graduated on time?

[tevarin]

Depending on the details, it could feel fair to me. Merit pay for teachers is a good thing.

Note that bonuses, raises, salaries in general often depend on the success of an entire company, rather than the particular effort put forth by the individual in question. It's not ideally fair, but it's a better approximation than random chance. At least there's some accountability, especially for those executives near the top.

[have_inner_lady]

The potential correlation between parts A and B of your post are a bit uncomfortable.

[tevarin]

Ack. No correlation intended. I didn't mean to suggest that Bush is better than the incompetent and reckless investment bankers demanding bailouts.