The Wail of the 1%

Excellent article @ NYMag.com, worth a read all the way through. Puts an enormous amount of detail around what's happening on Wall Street these days.

Some excellent comments by readers:

Let's get this straight now. If you went to Columbia or Wharton, you are ENTITLED to a certain level of pay. On behalf of everyone who has ever said "nobody owes you a job" I'd like to say the word is "hypocrite" and right about now it's written in letters made of brass that cast a shadow.

The answer to the Citigroup executive's question is very simple. The guy in the shiny truck does a better job of efficiently providing what people are willing to pay for. Explaining the relation between the executive not understanding this point and the current condition of the business is left as an exercise for the reader.

[Wall Street] hasn't really served any useful purpose for over a decade. Electronic trading made its primary reason for being redundant, and trading stocks in decimals instead of fractions took away one of its primary methods of making money. So they lobbied to deregulate markets so they could come up with complex financial instruments like derivatives that serve no useful purpose to society. Wall Street has become Las Vegas, but with other people's money and in granite instead of neon.

These people are no smarter than any professional, in any job, doing ANYTHING. They have the personal defect of greed. Delusions of grandeur does not make a valid case for 5%-15% tax rates. If someone really thinks you are worth the money, fine. Just don't ask me to pay 28% taxes while you pay 15%.