No Salary Bonuses for Bailed-out Companies

There has been a lot of talk recently about big businesses abusing their bailout funds; people were outraged that, while Americans were being laid off by the thousands, AIG was taking its employees to Southern California for a nice $440,000 corporate retreat. These funds were spent a week after the Federal Reserve extended an $85 billion emergency loan to AIG to keep it from going bankrupt due to insurance liabilities. If AIG was on the brink of going bankrupt, taxpayers argued, shouldn't it have been using its bailout money for something a little more practical?

Senator Claire McCaskill (Democrat) seemed to agree with these taxpayers; last Friday she proposed a bill that would limit Wall Street executives who accept TARP funding to be allowed no more than a $400,000 yearly salary, arguing that “You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses…What planet are these people on?”

And surely one would think that this limit to an annual compensation equal to the president’s is no where near being an unreasonable thing to ask of corporations, yet the bill had some people up in arms. People all over the media were saying that it’s wrong for the government to require that the failing banks not give out bonuses until they pay back the taxpayers for their hundreds of billions in bailout money, arguing these executives are the best at what they do and if the taxpayers don't pay their bonuses, these failing banks will lose their expertise and the economy will suffer.

Really? There’s a correlation between a failing bank losing its expertise--leading to economic suffering--and not allowing its employees to make more money than the president does?
….Does anyone else spy a slippery slope argument here?