When You’re Rich, They Think You Really Know: The Tevye Economy Ponzi Scheme

One of the familiar tropes on the right is that folks on the left don’t like profit. Wrong.

Personally, I’ve worked my butt off my whole life to pay my way through college, to save for our house purchase, to run my own business, to afford to stay home with my child.  Through my own life and folks in my own family, I have a keen appreciation of what it means to have very little, and the comfort that having a little more can bring. And I believe firmly that working hard to earn your own way can make any success all the sweeter.

In my family, work ethic is everything.  As is giving back to those less fortunate because it’s the right thing to do. 

What I don’t like? Stealing. Graft. And outright bilking. I’ll let Krugman explain:

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.

But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion….

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked….

At a time when people like to throw the word "values" around as a hollow PR ploy, how about instead we start living like we have some? Last I checked, rampant greed, avarice and theft were still wrong — even for the "haves" among us.   "Free money makes you stupid" is no excuse.

And for those elected officials who prop it up just to fill their election coffers?  The shame ought to be even larger.  You have a fiduciary obligation to the public’s interest — the whole public, not just the folks who lavish trips and planes on you.  It’s about damned time you started doing your jobs.  

The rest of us have to work hard to survive.  Maybe it’s time a whole lot of the so-called leaders among us re-learned what that’s like.

(YouTube — Topol sings "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler On The Roof. H/T to reader Bill.)

Related posts:

1. Concern Trolling from NYT’s Spokesman for The Rich
2. Taxing the Rich Will Make Them Go Galt! Um, No
3. More Innovation from Wall Street: Securitized Viaticals
4. Hey Blue Dogs: It’s Time For The Rich to Pay Back Those Tax Loans
5. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Barry Ritholtz – Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy