which, if you think about it, has "stop me before I kill again" aspects.

Ya know, our old 'noblesse oblige' class dressed humbly for a reason.

Think hard....consent of the....

Since some don't understand how alternet works.


Otherwords is a great liberal site.


http://otherwords.org/wall-street-bonuses-vs-minimum-wage/

Anyway kick and nominate


BTW Bill Moyers' site has this story too.

Can you explain how you can equate a private company giving bonuses to productive employees to several thousand independent business paying minimum wage?

Isn't it safe to assume that each of those employees getting a bonus met their employer's goals and earned their bonus? I know I have a set of goals that I have to meet to get my quarterly and annual bonuses.

Besides the logistics, how would you tell someone (like me) that even though I earned my bonus it's going to be redirected to give a minimum wage worker a raise?

What would that do for my motivation next year once my bonus has confiscated?

As most bonuses are performance-based, confusing any company's bonus plan with giving a group of other employees a pay raise makes for great rhetoric but fails the common-sense test.

Also, let's not overlook the fact that the state will collect taxes at a higher rate than ordinary income on those bonuses. I know I get killed with the tax rate on my bonuses.

But Wall Street's culture is fundamentally broken, as witnessed by the 2008 crisis in financial instruments they had invented and sold without fully understanding. Wall Street hasn't learned anything from that experience by all accounts, and continues to operate largely outside serious regulation, and reap big bonuses for leading the economy in risky and unsound ways.

I don't think the mechanics of getting a hold on bonuses and increasing the minimum wage works; but we could tax these outsized bonuses at a higher rate and use the money to rebuild our troubled infrastructure which would put a lot of people to work.

Bryant

Your sarcasm is cute but let's look at what happens when someone get a large bonus and spends it on a Ferrari :

They pay a huge amount of tax on the bonus
They pay sales tax and registration tax on the car
They provide income for the Ferrari dealer and all of its employees
They provide the commission for the salesperson
They help guarantee a job for the Ferrari mechanic
They help pay the car insurance salesman's salary
If they invest the money it help budding businesses have access to capital
If they save it the banks can loan it to families

and finally, they pay a lot of money in speeding tickets

I think the general attitude here, and a lot of other places, is that these bonuses are not earned or deserved. The people that get the bonuses are, typically, hard working people that produce for their employer.

and they choose to spend it on items not made by US citizens for fear of giving them jobs.