Breaking: Bankers Are Still Jerk-Offs
Did you think that, maybe, a growing month-long protest directed against the financial services industry would make investment bankers and money managers start to question themselves? Ha! You have never met a banker, have you?
No, as The New York Times documents, people whose job it is to literally play with money are still weenies of unbelievable proportions, three years after they completely broke the economy:
"Who do you think pays the taxes?" said one longtime money manager. "Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let's embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people."
He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. "They need to understand who their constituency is," he said.
Yes, this guy is, as the kids say, "for real." Just to be clear, Schumer and Gillibrand's constituency is the 18 million people who live in New York State, like, all of them, not just the 200,000 employed by financial services. Also! Financial services are not really "one of the last things we do in this country" (we do a lot of things in this country! That is why we have the largest economy in the world!), and, uh, "do it well"? You guys almost single-handedly murdered the economy in 2008 and had to be rescued by the taxpayers.
But, point taken! Longtime money managers are paying a lot in taxes (less, proportionally, than most of the rest of us, but who's counting, besides me?). The thing is, they are also making money smooth and manicured hand over elaborately-bejeweled fist (corporate profits and executive compensation are hitting near-record highs) while the rest of us aren't (unemployment won't budge from nine percent and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans have remained more or less the same over the last decade). So, I don't know, if you want to keep have your job attacked, keep making a lot of money while contributing as little as possible to the wider economy.
