(no subject)

[frandroid]

BITCH Ph.D. REPRESENT

Here's my own proposal, to follow on her trail: Tax all annual income above $250K at 90%!  Yeeha!

Comments

[batmanonfire.livejournal.com]

I can't understand how this AIG bonus scandal has been getting so much media airtime without the issue of who decided to write a contract offering them this money being properly looked at.

AIG is a company. They want money. The government said, 'Hey, since you're so big we can't let you go fail without our economy going into a tailspin, how about we give you a ton of money to make up for the idiotic moves you made to run yourself into the ground?' AIG says, 'Sure, write a contract that lets us spend a bunch of that money on bonuses for the people who got us into this mess.' and some group of assholes in the government decide this is a good idea (Dodd/Bernanke/whoever else) and write up the thing. And now people are mad at AIG? This seems misdirected to me.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Indeed. And I am not that incensed about the bonus altogether, since the bonuses are a drop in the bucket (Krugman talks about this), and really "bonus" in that industry really means "base salary". It's pretty crass that they're getting these bonuses, but hey, everyone else and their dog is overpaid in Manhattan too.

But the thing is, you can't look at this from the strictly rational point of view. Some journalist(s) has seized upon this as an illustration of what's wrong in the financial system, and has decided to run with it. It's fairly simple(istic): rich guys get fat bonuses at company they ran into the ground and that's benefiting from the largest government bailout in history, and now everyone in the media is running with this populist bit. The thing with these bonuses is that you don't need to understand scale to communicate the point. Everyone is losing money, and these guys are MAKING money. It's just pluses and minuses, which is close to a chunk of the general public's numeracy, or at leats how much people care about to know about this whole debacle. $170B, $1T, all these numbers have become abstract and lack reference, but pluses and minuses are still computable by everyone.

...

Actually, there's another view. It's simply that these bank employees, these executives, are the people who have driven the economy into the ground with their unbacked credit default swaps. "Burn them at the stake!" ...except that it's possible that they might be needed to unravel this mess anyway, just like the Bush administration should never have disbanded the Iraqi army and the Baath party. But right now, these are the bad guys, and there's no bloody way in hell they should be getting "bonuses".

[woobeans.livejournal.com]

ahahahahhah that was awesome

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

She lays down the law, and she needs no fancy language to do it!