Lawyer Dan Predicts: Heeeeere's Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live's Next Target

Meet Christine Romer. She's chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, and the latest face for our economic recovery plan.

She made an appearance on the Today Show this morning to explain the new plan to buy up toxic assets. All giddy and weird like she had just sucked down a helium balloon. What a looker, too! Obama needs to bury her, far away from the TV cameras. Then again, who's he got? Between her, Geithner and Sumners, he has no one with any presence to make his case. He's gotta infuse this team with someone with a personality, and the sooner, the better.

Hey, A-Rod! Lemme Give You Some Free Legal Advice!

Listen up, Mr. Man in the Mirror:

1. Right now, before you draw another breath, call your manager, lawyer, and publicist and say, "YOU'RE FIRED." My five year old is now in charge. She can only do better.

2. Then, call me. My psychiatrist's name is Michael. Nice Jewish guy on the Upper East Side, costs $300 an hour, doesn't accept insurance so there's no paper trail, hands out happy pills like they're Tic-Tacs. I'll give you his number. Tell him you need to see him immediately, and when he offers you drugs, take them, for Chrissakes! YOU NEED TO BE (legally) MEDICATED.

3. Never, EVER do a photo shoot again, for the rest of your life. You're officially out of the photo-op biz. How many more fuckin' photographs of yourself does the world really need? You surely didn't do this for the money, did you?

4. Throw away your iPhone. Don't save the numbers. Everyone in your life has led you astray or taken advantage. You have no friends, only enemies. Only an enemy or a very sick, twisted friend would allow you to do this to yourself.

5. Seriously, what the fuck were you thinking? A bare mattress? Cracked walls, a guinea tee and a nasty old truck tire as props? YOU ARE WORTH A BILLION DOLLARS. START ACTING LIKE IT. You see LeBron, Kobe or Tiger pulling shit like this?

6. Next time someone from the press (including your publicist) pitches you another "Great idea, Alex!", find a pair of Vice Grips, ratchet them around your testicles as tightly as possible, and tell yourself one hundred times, "THIS HURTS LESS THAN SPEAKING TO THE PRESS."

7. Just play ball, man. That's what you do well.

Are we clear?

Who Wants To Be A Trillionaire?

So now the Federal Reserve plans to pump one trillion dollars into the financial system. That's 12 zeros, as in $1,000,000,000,000. I think. Math was never my strong suit.

Anyhow, the Fed's idea du jour apparently is that the best way to save our economy is to give the same people who got us into this jam, who have already received a trillion dollars (give or take a few billion and not counting the $165 million in A.I.G. bonuses that Congress wants us to believe we'll get back), MORE MONEY. Of course, we don't really have any money to give, and we've reached our credit limit with other governments - China has already loaned us a trillion and has had enough of the Silly American Lending Game for now - so we'll just print the money!!! After all, it's just paper and ink, right?

Right.

How about this for an idea?

Instead of giving that two trillion dollars to the same elite group of degenerate, Mercedes-driving pigs who drove us off this cliff to begin with, let's distribute it evenly to everyone in America. There are about 300 million Americans. Two trillion dollars divided by 300 million comes out to roughly $6,700 per American. Everybody, young and old, taxpayer or not, rich and poor, gets $6,700. Fuck it, there's enough to go around, it's just paper!

In cash, bye-the-way, so the banks won't give us more of that "you have to wait a week for the check to clear" horseshit, and so we can actually SEE our money instead of hearing about it.

A married couple would receive a check for $13,200. A family of five would receive $33,500. The Jim Bob Dugger family with 18 kids on TLC would get... wait a minute... $134,000?! The religious funamentalists are gonna love this plan!

Then we can all go out and do what we Americans do best: BUY MORE SHIT! Forget about this top to bottom, trickle down nonsense. It doesn't work. It's just giving more money to the people who need it least. Let's bottom to top our way out of our economic doldrums, and give ALL the people flat screen TV's and Wii's!

A.I.G. Update

This afternoon, the House overwhelmingly voted to levy a 90% tax on bonuses paid to employees by companies accepting more than $5 billion in bailout money. The legislation is retroactive to January 1, 2009 and would apply to nearly a dozen companies, including A.I.G. which doled out some $165 million in bonuses this week. The legislation would not recover the $55 million in bonuses A.I.G. gave to its employees last December.

In a related development, six hundred and fifty seven large law firms in New York and Washington, D.C. posted emergency job openings on Craigslist this evening to meet "anticipated growth opportunities" in their corporate tax departments.

What's REALLY Wrong With Taxing the A.I.G. Bonuses?

It’s hard to find a corner right now that hasn’t been occupied by the debate over the A.I.G. bonuses – why they happened, who is responsible, when the Obama administration found out about them and, most importantly, what our elected officials can do to get the money back.

A.I.G. CEO Edward Liddy, facing mounting public criticism and pressure from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. “Timmy the Scapegoat” Geithner, has “asked” the recipients of the $165 million in bonuses to return half of it. Why anyone in their right mind would return a bonus to an employer that publicly pronounced that it was legally obligated to pay the bonus is just one of many questions without an answer that this mess has wrought. It’s not as though these executives can’t afford a battalion of thousand dollar per hour corporate lawyers to protect their money.

Democratic leaders in Congress have floated a Plan B for recovering the bonuses: Selectively tax them. Tax just the bonuses paid to just the A.I.G. executives. The money would flow back to the Treasury which would, if past is prologue, dole out the money again to A.I.G. so that it can continue to pay the salaries of the very executives who were paid the bonuses to begin with.

Brilliant! That’ll teach those greedy, money-grubbing executives!

Except that the Constitution forbids selective taxation. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that “the Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises… but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” Meaning that the IRS can’t single out any person or class of persons and require them to pay what amounts to a “special” tax that the rest of us aren’t required to pay. The Equal Protection Clause likewise acts as a bulwark against precisely that sort of targeted governmental action against individuals.

They teach this in law school. Like, where the President used to work before he became all famous and stuff. “I was a constitutional law professor,” President Obama said in 2007, “which means unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution.”

So that’s what was really wrong when the President ordered Timmy the Scapegoat to find a legal way to “block these bonuses and make the American taxpayer whole.”

President Obama knows full well – far better than most – that there is no legal way to get these bonuses back. Unless, of course, the A.I.G. executives decide out of the generosity of their hearts to donate their legally protected earnings to the American taxpayer. (Wonder if they could claim a charitable deduction on their 2009 returns?)

But the President sure sounded good when he directed Timmy the Scapegoat to add A.I.G. bonus recovery to his short list of responsibilities. “Under the circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivatives traders at A.I.G. warranted any bonuses at all, much less $165 million in extra pay,” the President said. Never mind the fact that the economic recovery bill restricted bonuses at companies receiving taxpayer money, except for bonuses granted by contract before February 11, 2009 (of which all of the A.I.G. bonuses were – way to go, Senator Dodd!).

You can’t let a boring, old constitutional article get in the way of a nifty, populist sound bite.