Eventually, the rich always overreach

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."

-- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1926

Back in 1985, the average working person in the United States made more money in a year than the average Wall Street financial worker received in an end-of-year bonus.

It wasn't a big deal. Joe Average made $19,000 a year and Joe Wall Street got nearly $14,000 in bonuses, and that was at the height of '80s "greed is good."

Well, things changed. By 2006, the average worker made about $45,000, which is stagnant when you figure in inflation, while Joe Wall Street (I was going to say JWS, but it looked vaguely anti-Semitic) was up near $195,000.

What the hell?

I've always thought that one of the biggest problems we have in this country right now is that people used to get paid for making things and now they get paid for moving money around. In Tom WolfeTom Wolfe's brilliant "Bonfire of the Vanities," Sherman McCoy described his job as making it easier for people to make a cake. His pay was the crumbs that fell off the cake.

Lots of cakes, lots of crumbs.

Anyway, Wall Street sort of imploded last year and we spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing all those guys out. We figured they would appreciate the help and behave themselves in the future.

Of course, we were stupid.

The rich really are different from you and me.

If you got rich -- or if I did -- I'm sure we would spend an awful lot of our time thanking God for the gifts he gave us. Well, the rich don't thank anybody. They assume they're rich because they're better people than folks who aren't rich, not that they were members of the Lucky Sperm Club.

I'll bet you even Paris HiltonParis Hilton assumes that she's rich as part of the natural order of things.

Brian Griffiths of Goldman Sachs International says pay inequities are good for us. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all," said Griffiths, who was an adviser to Margaret ThatcherMargaret Thatcher in the '80s.

Well, rich people are a lot like wingnuts on the left and the right. They assume that everyone should agree with them, so they often overreach. Inequities were even worse in the First Gilded Age 100 years ago, but Teddy RooseveltTeddy Roosevelt came along and spanked them and we had a lot more equitable economy.

It'll happen again.

It's just a pain to have to wait.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/20/wall-street-bonuses-vs-no_n_324281.html