You “can never be too rich or too thin,” said the Duchess of Windsor, who was wrong on both counts. As the economic crisis deepens, many Americans soon might discover what it means to be too thin, an insight that until now has been largely reserved for denizens of the developing world. This is changing. In January, US food banks saw a 30 percent increase in the number of people who couldn’t afford to buy enough food on their own, but 70 percent of food banks reported that they lacked the resources to feed those extra mouths.
Meanwhile, other Americans are shocked to discover that the rest of us think they are too rich. Listen to the chorus of Wall Street whining that greeted President Barack Obama’s proposal to cap executive pay at companies that take federal bailout money. (A measly $500,000 salary? Who can live on that?) But yes, Wall Street, it is possible to be too rich.
There is nothing inherently immoral about having a lot of money, if you can keep it in perspective. The median US household income in 2007 was $50,233, and only 5 percent of US households had incomes of more than $177,000. Statistically, if your income is anywhere near $500,000 a year, you are rich. If you make as much as the CEOs of the nation’s 500 biggest companies (whose compensation averaged $12.8 million in 2007), you are very, very rich. If you took in the $657 million averaged in 2006 by each of the top 20 private equity and hedge fund managers, you are insanely rich.
But are you too rich? Well, if you find yourself appalled at the thought of getting by on $500K a year, and you are not the sole support of 10 special-needs children or perhaps a small Third World village or two, you have gotten too rich. If charity balls, chauffeured limos, a household staff and private jets feel like necessities rather than luxuries, you are too rich. And if you have come to feel you have a right to feed at the government bailout trough, but you denounce it as creeping socialism when you are asked to show some personal financial self-discipline in exchange, then yes, you are too rich. But, but, but, squeal opponents of executive compensation caps. Link executive pay caps to the receipt of bailout funds and the executives themselves will bail out!
As Meredith Whitney, an analyst at CIBC Oppenheimer bank, recently put it on Bloomberg TV, “Wall Street attracts the best and the brightest because of its compensation structure.” Impose pay caps and “the best and brightest will still figure out a way to make money, (but) it may not be on Wall Street when those minds are needed the most.”
Call it the “best and the brightest” theory of executive compensation: Smart people are greedy, but we need smart people to get our financial system out of this mess, so we had better enable those smart Wall Streeters to stay in the ranks of the super-rich.
This would be a persuasive argument if those very same smart people hadn’t gotten us into this mess in the first place. Recall that the phrase “the best and the brightest” gained popular currency with David Halberstam’s 1972 book of the same name chronicling how the brightest minds of the Kennedy administration embroiled America in the disastrous Vietnam War. In the 1960s, the “best and the brightest” brought us Vietnam. In the 2000s, they brought us subprime mortgages, credit-default swaps and a global financial crisis of unprecedented scale.
