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 other words, he deserves his money because he bawled loudly.

No. He can go screw himself.

– bi

Wasn’t the Fed income tax rate something like 80%?

Frackin socialist…

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.

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.

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!

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.