Everyone's up in arms that the folks who ran/run AIG, the failing insurance giant, are to receive huge, contractual bonuses totalling in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Barack Obama says he will use every legal avenue possible to get out of paying those bonuses and other prominent politicians are proclaiming similar thoughts. I, of course, have the solution.
No one on this planet is better at figuring out how to avoid paying money that is contractually guaranteed than insurance company execs. Let's hire the folks who run AIG to come up with a way to get out of paying the bonuses to the folks who run AIG. Or if for some reason they don't want to do that, let's hire the staff at some other big insurance company to find a loophole.
I had a friend who parked his car on the street one night and came back in the morning to find it had been totalled by someone who had crashed into it and then fled the scene. My friend's insurance company refused to pay off the claim because, they insisted, the wreckage was more than eighteen inches from the curb, suggesting my friend had not parked his vehicle in a legal manner. My friend argued that he had, and that the collision had moved his parked car away from the curb. The insurance company said, in effect, "Prove it." I think he finally got some money out of them but not the full amount specified in his policy.
The guy at his insurance company who handled that case? He could come up with a way to not pay those bonuses to the AIG guys. Let's get him.