{"id":197552,"date":"2008-01-25T18:08:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T23:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/25\/one-of-the-joys-of-the-internet-finding-people-smarter-than-me\/"},"modified":"2008-01-25T18:08:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T23:08:00","slug":"one-of-the-joys-of-the-internet-finding-people-smarter-than-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/25\/one-of-the-joys-of-the-internet-finding-people-smarter-than-me\/","title":{"rendered":"One of the Joys of the Internet: Finding People Smarter Than Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know his name, but the person known as &#8220;the Scanner&#8221; is one of them.<\/p>\n<p>He has an <a href=\"http:\/\/thescannerblog.blogspot.com\/2008\/01\/modest-proposal.html\">ingenious proposal for dealing with the issue of bailing out financial institutions<\/a> that are drowning in the &#8220;Big Sh%$pile&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Here\u2019s my proposal. I offer it at no charge to any member of Congress, presidential candidate or editorial writer willing to bear the calvary of getting the stink-eye next time at Harry Cipriani. If it becomes necessary to bail out the monoliners to prevent a depression, there will be terms. For once, the highly-paid beneficiaries of a taxpayer-financed bailout will not get off scot-free.<\/p>\n<p>Congress shall specify that no bailout will take place unless and until (a) every bailed out monoliner and (b) every financial institution holding a bailed-out policy certifies that its employees have voluntarily agreed to accept a 25% federal income tax surcharge on every dollar earned above $200,000 for a period of 5 years. A young hotshot earning $300,000 would see $25,000 added to his tax bill. An elder pulling down $1 million would owe an extra $200,000. Since some of the biggest Wall Street multinationals are policyholders, and since this would apply to every one of their employees over $200,000, we could be talking about a lot of people and a lot of money. It could even go some way towards making the bailout pay for itself.<\/p>\n<p>Politically, it\u2019s a winner. Fiscally, it\u2019s sound. It\u2019s extraordinarily well-targeted to precisely the assholes who got us into this mess in the first place. John Edwards: Have your staff contact me through the comments box.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My only difference would be that I would go for a higher surcharge, perhaps something like 50%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know his name, but the person known as &#8220;the Scanner&#8221; is one of them. He has an ingenious proposal for dealing with the issue of bailing out financial institutions that are drowning in the &#8220;Big Sh%$pile&#8221;. Here\u2019s my proposal. I offer it at no charge to any member of Congress, presidential candidate or &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1261,973,1004,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bubble","category-economy","category-finance","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}