High Hats At The Taxpayers’ Soup Kitchen

From today’s House hearings on giving $25 billion to Ford, GM, and Chrysler, watch Representative Gary Ackerman rip into Detroit’s CEOs for promising to “streamline” their businesses right after all three of them flew to Washington on “private luxury jets”:

Just to drive Ackerman’s points home, here’s how much the top execs now shaking “tin cups” at the taxpayer made last year. We’ve posted these numbers before, but they certainly bear repeating:

- Richard Wagoner, GM:$14.4 million

- Alan Mulally, Ford: $21.6 million. And as ABC News reports, Mulally gets to use the company jet to fly home to Seattle every weekend.

- Bob Nardelli, Chrysler: Claims he is making a buck a year in salary. Guess he can afford it, since he got $210 million to quit his old job running Home Depot. But if you believe Nardelli makes anything less than eight figures a year for Chrysler after they give him all of his performance bonuses and other “indirect” forms of compensation, we’ve got a few very nice, slightly used bridges to sell you.

These three jokers pull in tens of millions while their companies crash and burn and tens of thousands of their workers are laid off. With that record of unaccountability, they belong on Capitol Hill, where 9 out of 10 incumbents are reelected every two years even though only 1 out of 5 Americans think they’re up to the job.