Stimulus Package

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, in the course of debating the economic stimulus legislation, every Senator I have talked to has been interested in trying to find savings to keep down the cost of the economic stimulus bill. I have come to the floor this afternoon because it appears that when the Senate debates the final stimulus legislation, it is not going to include a bipartisan provision to protect taxpayers, a bipartisan provision which would require that Wall Street companies that recently paid excessive bonuses be required to pay those bonuses back to the taxpayers.

Taxpayers in this country were horrified several weeks ago to learn about the fact that recently Wall Street companies that had received TARP financing--TARP, of course, being the Troubled Asset Relief Program--had just paid $18 billion in bonuses. Once that news became public, everybody in Government spoke out against the bonuses. Everybody lined up in front of the television cameras to say the bonuses were wrong. Everybody said that it was outrageous and unacceptable for these Wall Street bonuses to have been paid when these institutions were receiving billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

After the news, three of us on the Senate Finance Committee--a bipartisan group--said we were going to do more than say the bonuses were wrong; we were going to take steps to make sure the bonuses were actually paid back. So we came together and put forward a bipartisan proposal. We collaborated with law professors across the country and had the Joint Committee on Taxation, under the able leadership of Edward Kleinbard, review the financial underpinnings of the proposal, and they found that our modest approach that would allow taxpayers to be paid back the excessive amount of the cash bonuses would generate $3.2 billion for American taxpayers--just a fraction of what had been paid out. We felt it was a modest proposal. We felt it was a bipartisan proposal.

The fact is, nobody would oppose our idea in broad daylight, but it now seems that when the ink is dry on the final legislation, the taxpayers of this country are still going to get soaked. It is not right. It is not right because taxpayers in this country have been taking a beating with their health care costs and their fuel costs and trying to figure out how to stay in their homes.

Companies normally pay bonuses when they are doing well. That wasn't the case with these Wall Street financial firms. Here is the math. The Wall Street firms took $274 billion in taxpayer money. When they weren't doing well, they paid $18 billion in bonuses, but they couldn't pay the taxpayers $3.2 billion of the amount paid--the excessive amount paid--in cash bonuses when the taxpayers are being hit in their wallets, as we all have seen every time we are home and talking to our constituents.

The arguments of the financial firms don't add up to me, and they aren't going to add up to the millions of taxpayers whose money has gone to the financial firms. The taxpayers deserve to see in this stimulus legislation that somebody was actually standing up for them; that it wasn't just about speeches; it wasn't just about saying something was wrong; it was about backing up those words and taking concrete action to protect taxpayers.

So I have come to the floor more than anything else to make it clear that I am a persistent guy, and I am going to stay at this until there is a better accounting for our taxpayers' money, until Congress puts a stop to these kinds of actions where financial firms take taxpayers' money and give the citizens of this country a runaround. This needs to end, and it needs to end now. It means concrete action has to be taken. That means more than speeches.

We know in the days ahead these financial firms are likely to come back to the Congress of the United States and say they need additional sums of money to deal with the toxic loans that are on their books. How can one have confidence about giving these firms additional money when they have just paid bonuses during these tough times and they have fought--I know for a fact--against a reasonable provision to require that these bonuses be paid back.

I intend to stay at this. It concerns me greatly that we didn't have a recorded vote here on the floor of the Senate on this provision. I knew that nobody would oppose this in broad daylight, but I had no idea there would be such an aggressive effort behind the scenes to kill a modest step to protect taxpayers, and particularly to find savings in this legislation. For days now, Senators of both political parties have been talking about ways to hold down the costs. A bipartisan group of Senators found a way--a reasonable way--to save more than $3 billion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

It is time to put a stop to financial firms taking taxpayers' money and using the money to pay bonuses to many of the same people responsible for the current financial crisis. I am old enough to know that normally you pay bonuses when you do well. That is what the American economy is all about. That is what capitalism is all about. Somehow, some of these institutions think they ought to be able to privatize their gains and socialize their losses. That is not right, and it wasn't right to kill this modest provision to force the repayment of the excessive amount of these Wall Street bonuses.

So I intend to come back to the floor of the Senate on this subject. I will do everything I can to get a fair shake for the taxpayers of Oregon and the taxpayers of this country. I wish this bonus recovery provision was in the stimulus legislation that will be voted on here in the Senate. I regret greatly that it is not. I am going to stay with this until the taxpayers recover this money that shouldn't have been paid out in the first place.

I yield the floor.

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