the tindog coffeehouse

John C Abell at Wired’s Epicenter blog argues that companies receiving money from the government’s $700 billion bailout rescue plan should be free to use that money to pay for executive bonuses. To come to that conclusion, he looks at the public funding of Planned Parenthood in the 1980s:

In 1984 the Reagan administration denied family planning funds to any overseas group that offered counseling about abortion, and generally opposed public sex education for teens (which works) and supported abstinence education (which doesn’t).

It was willing, in other words, to make a bad investment in order to advance a principle.

The funding decision affected Planned Parenthood, which is under the umbrella of an overseas organization. They made an intriguing case for being able to spend as they saw fit while taking the money: we won’t spend your money on abortion education. We have other money; we’ll use that.

Abell’s argument is that just as Planned Parenthood should be able to use public funds to offer abortion counseling, financial companies should be able to use public funds to pay for executive bonuses because  “[e]xperts should manage the business. Amateurs with agendas should not.”

Never mind that the taxpayer-funded bailout rescue plan was never intended to pay for bonuses. The idea that the same executives who ran not just their own companies but the entire economy into the ground should be financially rewarded for their performance is ludicrous. At a time when a company like Citigroup is laying off an additional 53,000 employees to cut costs, I don’t think executive officers should be collecting massive bonuses, whether the money to pay for those bonuses is public or not.

Abell insists that companies still need to be able to compete for top talent, even in a bad economy. Fair enough. But how effective is a company if it can’t even pay for its own rank-and-file employees? It’s the chicken-and-egg conundrum: Which comes first, the superstar CEO or the high-performing company? If the CEO is the only employee left in the company, then I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?

As for the abortion counseling argument, Abell may think funding abstinence education is a “bad investment,” but since it’s the taxpayers’ money, the taxpayers should have a say in how it’s used. And I, for one, do not want my money going to pro-abortion organizations such as Planned Parenthood.