Now this is the Henry Waxman that I’ve been waiting to see. Wall Street still thinks that they can call the shots and get away with anything including $70 billion in year end bonus money and bonus increases. Now is the time to have this argument. January is too late. From the Washington Post:

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, noted that before the infusion, the banks had spent or allocated $108 billion on employee compensation and bonuses for the first nine months of 2008, nearly the same amount as last year.

“I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry’s worst years on record,” Waxman wrote in a letter to the banks.

Lawmakers across the political spectrum want to ensure that the government’s bailout program results in increased lending, not bigger paydays for executives.

Banking industry officials said they fully intend to use money from the government’s bailout program to make loans and increase liquidity. They noted that bonuses are a normal part of compensation packages. The fact that the allocations on compensation so far in 2008 are identical to last year suggests that the bailout money will be not used to boost bonuses, they said.

“Waxman’s barking up the wrong tree,” said Scott E. Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the nation’s most powerful banks, brokerages and insurers. “We reject his basic premise. The institutions fully intend to use the money to start making loans.”

But a new study suggests that financiers are still bullish about their bonuses. More than two-thirds of Wall Street professionals are expecting a bonus this year, and 36 percent are anticipating a larger bonus than last year, according to a survey by eFinancialCareers, a career networking company.