Why is Rush Limbaugh defending AIG bonuses?


With pretty much everyone blasting the totally unearned bonuses at American International Group (NYSE: AIG), there was a need for someone to defend these poor bankers.

Describing the AIG-outage as "peasants with pitchforks, tossing around words like "communist" to describe people who are speaking out against rewards for failure, Rush Limbaugh came to to their rescue.

It's sort of weird that Limbaugh would decide to take up such an indefensible cause, but here's the rebuttal to his argument: Without these bailouts, those bonuses would be toast. They wouldn't have gotten paid their bonuses and they would have lost their jobs. So this isn't a question of government intervention with executive pay but really a question of whether we ought to use taxpayer money to reward people who worked at a firm that has since required $160 billion in taxpayer handouts.

Check out The Young Turks' dismantling of Limbaugh's argument in the video below.

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