Healthcare is the key Achilles heel of the US manufacturing workforce. [...] While on the worldwide market, labor competes with other countries where healthcare is nationalized. This makes it impossible for blue-collar US labor to compete. But the problem is self-created!

Finally, the tax system is skewed to the rich. Why do we tax “capital gains” at 15% and tax labor income at 30-50%? [Can anyone spell S-T-U-P-I-D ?] I think I would actually PREFER labor income to capital income. Working people are important! The next key break in the tax system… is the FICA tax, which is 12.4% for all income up to 100k, but then capped. So someone who makes $1M… only pays 1.2% FICA! This is an 11% regressive differential in the marginal tax rate. Both of these tax issues are massive INCENTIVES to Goldman Sachs and massive tax hits to the largest employers — WalMart, for example.

If capital gains taxes were 20% and FICA was changed to 3% employee / 3% match on ALL INCOME. A lot of the US imbalances would go away.

Kind of hard to argue with that, don’t you think?

Alas, I have to strongly disagree with his last sentence:

AIG/Goldman is such a petty little issue. Our govt spends 200-300B every month.

Quid? Tu quoque fili? AIG/GS ain’t so bad cause our go-vermin is worse?

So, on the theory that one is worse than the other, we should NEGLECT the consequences of the behavior of the “least” offender?

Hmmm! Not quite!

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/02/the-nyts-latest-goldmanaig-salvo-missing-the-real-targets.html

Lil’ typo there Barry on that first ‘AIG’

what???

Goldman Sachs sucks. Lloyd Blankfein is a monster, a spineless self-serving trollop. Everyone off the top 1000 executives at GS should be arrested, stripped of all their wealth, tar and feathered and then sent to spend eternity in a prison for male sex offenders and sociopaths. The surviving members of their families should be sold off to people in foreign lands.

Repeat the above to all the other money grubbing scum sucking nincompoops who are masquerading as educated decent executive who are just doing their job in the financial service industry.

This is not populist anger. This is a plan.

This is non-sense. And yet, govt people dont seem to want to separate… what has been LENT (still $200B)… from what has been LOST (little to nothing, yet).

You show this same bias throughout. Fed purchase of GSE debt… will definatively ONLY make money. The only way it would lose money is if we let Fannie or Freddie fail… right? Do you understand this?

you heard it here first

so the numbers are one thing, but ultimately what makes us angry (and rightly so) is that the market and the economy have been rigged — openly, and by design — to favor particular people (bank execs, bank bondholders) at the expense of everyone else. moreover, it was done against our protests and against our will, with OUR money and at the risk of our currency. now, even if you accept the Geithner doomsday scenario, they had no right to do what they did. let me repeat that. they had no right to act against the express wishes of the people and no right to bend and twist the law in order to bail out particular banks, their execs and their bondholders.

and yet, even if you want to believe that the world would have ended had we not bailed out every single large institution, their bondholders and their creditors, there is absolutely no good reason that these same taxpayer-supported institutions are paying their people millions and tens of millions per annum. none. it is baldly unfair and this unfairness is a primary source of our anger.

even worse, hardly anyone has even been *investigated* for fraud — whether in the writing of CDS or in the packaging and selling of particular MBS, etc. eric holder, where are ya bud?

this isn’t “populist bull shit,” it’s a real concern for the rule of law, for fairness and for our democratic form of government.

” As AIG got more and more distressed, Goldman offered to cancel the insurance contracts AIG had written on Goldman’s behalf AND buy the contracts AIG held with other banks at deeply distressed prices. This was presumably before Tim Geithner charged in and paid out those contracts at 100 cents on the dollar.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-this-just-in-goldman-sachs-killed-aig-2010-2

A bit of difference in the numbers from what BR posted above and the article from Businessinsider.com

In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm.

And more not mentioned above.

In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions, a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Société Générale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G., was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck.

It appears that Geithner continues to stand out as the idiot responsible for paying out 100 percent on the dollar to AIG. He wasn’t doing for AIG, but for his pals at Goldman.