I think I’m getting the hang of this ol’ capitalism thing-a-majiggy.
Because we’re in a recession, it would be irresponsible – naive even – for Obama to refrain from exacting a pound of flesh from average Americans. How long can he continue to deny reality? After all, in down economic times, we “all” have to make sacrifices. Like, say, slashing social security, medicare and unemployment benefits. Or raising taxes on the middle class, lowering minimum wage and laying off police officers, firefighters and teachers. That’s just off the top of my head. It’s the responsible thing to do.
Fear not, though. Those sacrifices will make the sacrificees better in the long run – reinforce their moral fiber and, ultimately, lead to true happiness! Struggle is good for the soul and the spirit! Everyone should do it! Almost.
On the other hand, if the government asks for any portion of this guy’s $742,006.40 after tax* bonus back because, well, the government is bankrolling his firm with taxpayer money (read: the sacrificial offerings of the masses), and that’s a lot of money to be paid out on the government’s dime, then that’s not wholesome, moral girding sacrifice at all. It’s hoary socialism and will lead to the downfall of society.
Also, very mean to the poor millionaires, causing unspeakable distress in their lives and forcing them to make tough – nay, impossible – choices about such matters as how to pay for the 24/7 nanny and afford the annual ski excursion to Gstaad. I mean, can you think of how? Huh? Huh? Didn’t think so smart ass.
It’s just a matter of time before such enormous sacrifices drive them to drink, do drugs, divorce, have heart attacks, develop ulcers, etc. It will ruin their lives, deprive them of any chance at lasting happiness and corrupt their morals.
What kind of depraved soul would wish that on the top earning 1% of the population, especially when we’re going out of our way to bolster the morality and happiness quotients of everyone else?
*Do you know how big the bonus would have to be to be left with $742,006.40 after taxes? Pretty fucking big.
March 25, 2009 at 9:56 am
gotta take care of those guys or they’ll leave the company. last thing we need in this economy is brain drain in the financial sector. best and the brightest, bro.
March 25, 2009 at 10:00 am
also. i’m surprised it’s not getting more notice in teh blargospear, but AIG is suing the government. i think it would be funny if more people noticed it. not just because i posted about it or anything.
March 25, 2009 at 10:13 am
heh
March 25, 2009 at 10:45 am
LOLWUT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
This may be a good time to invest in pitchforks.
– bi
March 25, 2009 at 10:53 am
[...] at The Poor Man Institute captures some of this in the call for sacrifice from the common man. Because we’re in a recession, it would be [...]
March 25, 2009 at 11:31 am
Let them leave and go apply their skill in China or India. Please….
Well China may be out, but India is still Okay. After all, if you screw up in China, they politely supply your counterrevolutionary brain with its missing ration of 1.2 grains of high velocity lead projectile.
March 25, 2009 at 11:35 am
And then bill your family for the raw ingredients.
March 25, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Damn, if I only had a minimal understanding of high school algebra and a total lack of ethics, I too could be cashing a $742,006.40 bonus check. Alas, those type of super genius skills can only be found in a half million or so Americans – how will we ever replace our god-like business executives if they get pissed off and leave?
March 25, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Nothing sadder than seeing the uber-rich get all butt-hurt about not getting my tax money.
Allow me to dance my Jig of Dispair.
March 25, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Aye, tis a mournful jig it is
March 25, 2009 at 1:23 pm
how will we ever replace our god-like business executives if they get pissed off and leave?
How? Um. How about – why?
This would be one case where having no plan is a fine plan indeed.
In other words – see ya!
March 25, 2009 at 1:44 pm
The thing is, if you check say, Hagen Kleinert’s expansive tome ‘Path Integrals in Yada yada yada and Financial Markets’, yeah doing some analysis of curled up paths may take some skill. Which is why they hire Indian postdocs who will gladly sweat them out in the basement for 150,000 a year. Great bux for guys who couldn’t get any tenure because they do ‘untrendy’ physics.
150K is, of course, these execs coffee money, so they can each hire their own personal Sanjay-the-risk-management-Monkey. And never have to figure out which regularization scheme works best with the Scholes-Black integrator.
Or even what that means.
March 25, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Oh Great Cthullhu — do the rich indeed taste smooth and buttery? Are they really THAT much better eatin’ than us regular folks?
March 25, 2009 at 3:39 pm
All I’m saying is:
a) not all rich people are to blame for the current economic crisis.
b) some rich people earn their money – and do whatever that money’s amount of good is for the society.
c) randomly deciding what someone’s time is worth or not worth because you are angry at their employer is stupid.
Oh wait, I forgot – I’m really angry about the current economy – Fuck Em All.
March 25, 2009 at 3:42 pm
AIG should have never allowed to be. Period.
March 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm
a) True
b) True, but rarer than (a)
c) Um, not random at all. Just calling on everybody to sacrifice. Especially those working for a company receiving billions of taxpayer dollars. Surely all those non-blameworthy, upstanding rich people would agree. No?
March 25, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Rich people can handle a 4% tax increase. Could we please get fucking serious? I understand that these bonus deals were made prior to the AIG collapse, but working people get laid off all the time for no fault of their own. Shit stinks. The top 25 hedge fund managers made half a billion each last year, betting that you would lose your 401K/nest egg.
We want people to attain wealth via merit, not via luck or preying on the weak. In the long run creating green jobs, reforming health care, and education helps the rich by creating a sustainable consumer for their “goods”. We’re not trying to be punitive to the rich, we’re trying to save the rich from themselves, again.
March 25, 2009 at 4:30 pm
I mean Jesus fucking Christ, this shit is not hard to understand. Pull the Glenn Beck out of your ears and pick up a copy of the The Economist, (a conservative magazine btw, except they don’t huff paint, like our “conservatives.”)
March 25, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I got their unspeakable distress right here.
March 25, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Whatshisname’s letter is actually very affecting, provided you divide every dollar amount by 100.
Also, I hereby announce my willingness to take over such 6+ figure jobs these formerly-fairly-compensated dears cannot, in good conscience, continue to do. I don’t know I damn thing about it, but I bet I could get myself spun up pretty quickly in exchange for a $750,000 annual post-tax bonus.
March 25, 2009 at 5:42 pm
That’s called a coffee party.
March 25, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I think there’s a pretty big space between a 4% tax hike (an excellent idea) and asking someone to work 60 hour weeks for no pay simply because they can afford to.
Even if what you want is a heavily leveled field where no one makes more than say 100k or less than say 50k (and I like the Swiss, I really do) – it doesn’t make sense to just take back the 0.1% of bailout funds that are going to people that might be actually >gasp< earning that money. The real shitbags have already left the building – you’ve deflected your outrage onto scapegoats, the lowest lying fruit.
And banks don’t totally suck, corrupt banks do. “Production for use,” is a great populist mantra, but the financial industry (loans, start-up capital, security, collective ownership (stocks)) has done some pretty important things. That’s why we’re going so far to try and save it.
I’m not really sure what the best solution is, but it is not lynching the competent.
March 25, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Considering the unending tears and whining coming from CNBC since Obama was elected, I’m buying 100 shares of Kleenex.
March 25, 2009 at 9:02 pm
One word: FOPPINGADREEF!!!!!!!!!
When these people are “competent” either in losing money, or ‘earning’ money by “slow-walking” information for stress-testing banks, or moving money to offshore tax havens, well, let them all go to hell.
Or Go Galt.
– bi
March 26, 2009 at 3:03 am
the annual ski excursion to Gstaad
Seriously, who the fuck goes to Gstaad these days? It hasn’t been hip since the early 90s. All the really hep cats go to Lebanon now.
March 26, 2009 at 4:48 am
I think there’s a pretty big space between a 4% tax hike (an excellent idea) and asking someone to work 60 hour weeks for no pay simply because they can afford to.
So do I. I also don’t recall me suggesting that the average compensation for employees of these firms should be $0.00. But do I think we should claw back a portion of the bonus (not the base salary mind you)?
Yes.
But I’m fairly confident that any such claw will not come close to grabbing anything even approaching all of the salary and other compensation. Nor should it. When that danger arises, I’ll shift my focus.
The real shitbags have already left the building
Not all of em. And it’s not just about the specific SOBs that caused the current catastrophe. This is about out of control compensation across the board. Even in non-financial sector jobs, executive compensation compared to the average salary in the applicable corporate entity is severely off kilter by historical standards.
I’m not opposed to people getting rich – shit, I’m actually fairly well off myself and would like to continue in such a manner indefinitely. But this bullshit where executives get huge bonuses when their companies do well, but huge bonuses when their companies do horribly MUST STOP.
I live in NYC. I know kids that I went to high school with who are working at I-Banks who get quarterly bonuses (every three months, not annually) in the 6 figures. Well into the 6 figures. For executing trades on behalf of their clients. Little else.
These kids are not generally brilliant, dynamic nor huge contributors to our nation’s economic health. They just chose the right womb to gestate in, and were competent enough to not flunk out of high school and college.
They are, almost to a man/woman, not worth even one of their quarterly bonuses, let alone the other three plus their base salaries.
Galt them all.
March 26, 2009 at 5:54 am
ibid.
March 26, 2009 at 6:19 am
You will never get the quality legislation required to unravel the gordian knots established by the undue influence of special interests because of their access due to the need for campaign donations by politicians to attain and retain power. Obama is learning this, evidently, during this budget battle. I strongly recommend that Obama put his full power into remaking the system of campaign funding in a novel way that retains free speech requirements that the SCOTUS requires while allowing equality of access to our democratic representatives. If you do this you have to have to put civics and economics on the same level as reading, writing, and math. There is no way around this.
March 26, 2009 at 6:20 am
No matter what your solutions on Banking issues, you’re good ideas get hacked to pieces by the undemocratic nature of a system where 10% of the people have all the influence.
March 26, 2009 at 7:45 am
O que o Kleber disse.
The AIG bailout–every bailout–is an emergency measure. The guy whining in the Times about his bonus is bitching about fairness in a time of crisis. It doesn’t matter that his unit wasn’t responsible for the problem. The not-fairness of it affects him (in a not-fair way), but the mammoth not-fairness of his company’s behavior is now affecting all of us, in a larger and more not-fair way.
Why should his life remain unaffected? Why should the effects of this gigantic, systemic failure not touch him? God knows it’s touching everybody else.
We’re airlifting bags of rice and powdered milk to an earthquake zone, and this clown is sad because his private pantry of frozen steaks has been condemned because the building is about to collapse. So he wants steaks from us because the earthquake isn’t his fault.
In the end, apparently, he did the right thing. He quit. We’ll say “he’ll be missed” once we stop running around trying to salvage what we can and worrying about aftershocks.
March 26, 2009 at 11:15 am
Well that all makes a bunch of sense.
That the wealthy and powerful stay wealthy and powerful by moving around wealth and power sux.
I still say that hatred for class privilege should not be tangled up with concepts of fairness and merit. It never makes sense to treat someone unfairly (taking away promised money) out of anger. Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense to penalize hard-working people who contribute (to the success of the bailout in this case) out of spite for the idle who have caused the problem.
We’re talking about, in this case, the allocation of .0006% of the bailout funds to an employee who claims to have brought in 100 times that. In this case it seems not only more than fair, but a judicious use of taxpayer money.
huge bonuses when their companies do horribly MUST STOP.
If we do really want to get rid of do-nothing, lamprey, society-leeching, womb-fed pariahs, we need to start by recognizing true merit and rewarding it appropriately.
And kittens are soft!
March 26, 2009 at 11:20 am
Not war kittens!
March 26, 2009 at 11:23 am
But to your larger point: I’m envisioning a leveling of the playing field in terms of compensation and taxation that prevailed during the prolonged boom period post WWII.
During that period, plenty of people got rich, and the country was extremely productive. So to, again, can we do that even with higher marginal rates on the top tax brackets, and a little more balance in terms of the executive to average worker salary ratio.
That’s not out of anger, that’s just out of a belief that societies tend to work better when there is not as great a disparity of wealth as we have nowadays.
No, I’m not a socialist – and neither was Ike. So let’s do like Ike did.
March 26, 2009 at 11:46 am
what benefit was there to not letting AIG go into bankruptcy? the government could have still stepped in, said no to the bonuses, and maybe even ruled that the CDSs were b.s. and refused to pay them out. (HA!)
the company failed. doesn’t matter whose fault it was. it doesn’t seem right that public money be used for paying the bonuses. (or is it boni?) and even more insulting that it was used to pay off $20 billion of Goldman Sachs’ gambling debts.
March 26, 2009 at 7:23 pm
I’m envisioning a leveling of the playing field in terms of compensation and taxation that prevailed during the prolonged boom period post WWII.
Wasn’t the Fed income tax rate something like 80%?
Frackin socialist…
March 26, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Sympathy for the Rich:
In other words, he deserves his money because he bawled loudly.
No. He can go screw himself.
– bi
March 27, 2009 at 11:53 am
[...] pm on March 27, 2009 | # | The Heartland Institute republishes AIG ex-VP Jake DeSantis’s resignation letter. After 12 months of hard work dismantling the [...]
March 31, 2009 at 3:09 pm
At this point, I say we just string up Sympathy for the Rich. Anyone bitching and moaning this much because of a perceived threat to their class interest shouldn’t be treated any better than the crap you wipe off the bottom of your shoe.
April 2, 2009 at 8:18 pm
My microscopic violin playing for the sufferings of the rich – let me show you it.