The House of Representatives just passed a bill levying a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid out since January 1st at any company that's received more than $5 billion in taxpayer money. Noam Scheiber is unnerved, to say the least. "Getting people to hand over money under the threat of legislation that will take it from [them] retroactively is pretty damn coercive," he writes. "There are third-world juntas that would think twice before doing this." Maybe. Though that seems to overstate the how general this bill is. The "coercion" is taxation, the target is bonuses, and the affected population is limited to employees of banks that taxpayers have been forced to subsidize with more than $5 billion (in some cases, it's been hundreds of billions of dollars). Frankly, I think we might be a little overly concerned about the feelings of our financiers. If wealthy bankers living amidst a junta had tanked the national economy and thrown millions out of work, I imagine they'd have more to worry about than heavy taxation of their yearly bonuses.
