While many Hollywood stars may have raised a champagne flute yesterday to mark President Obama's signing of the stimulus package, actor Kelsey Grammer was not among them. The actor best known for his roles in "Cheers" and "Frasier" told NewsBusters's sister organization CNSNews.com recently that he was a "free enterprise guy" who feared that CEO pay caps included in the corporate bailouts were a "sort of a deal with the devil."
CNSNews.com staffer Nicholas Ballasy caught up with Grammer recently at a ceremony marking the reopening of Ford's Theatre where the actor panned the package as rewarding "evildoers" who have wrecked the economy:
GRAMMER: I think government is responsible to make sure we go after people that are evildoers. There's plenty of those to go around, from the bottom up and from the top down. The only problem I see with the stimulus package is that as a rule, it awards all the people that are evildoers, all of them. And that's a problem, for me, personally.
[...]
BALLASY: Any example of the evildoers that you were just mentioning in the actual bill? Who you're saying it benefits?
GRAMMER: Unfortunately, if we're going to be buying up bad mortgages, all the people that were paying their mortgages are the good guys. It's a little confusing, a little difficult....
[...]
GRAMMER: It may not be a popular position to take but I honestly believe that the bill is fraught with the idea that those who did the most damage to our country -- from the bottom up and the top down -- are the ones that are actually going to get the most reward.
Asked about Obama's tax plans and if he'd mind paying higher taxes, Grammer confessed he doesn't "think it's fair" but that he's resigned himself to paying "in excess of 60 percent of my income" under the Obama administration's tax plans.
