Just a thought on $20 billion

A couple of headlines have jumped out at me lately. One is about the $20 billion in bonuses that executives from bailed out banks have collected recently. The other is the jobless numbers for January. 598,000 people lost their jobs last month, a number close to the entire population of Vermont. These numbers have a relationship.

The median household income in this country is around $50,000. Considering that about three-quarters of the households in the U.S. are two-income households, $33,333 each would put a couple comfortably above the median. Why did I pick $33,333? Round numbers. At that salary, a million dollars would pay 30 people for a year.

What about that $20 billion in bonuses? It would pay 600,000 people $33,333 each for a year. In other words, the chunk of bailout money that banks slipped into the pockets of their executives could have been used to keep those 598,000 unfortunates in work for another year, with a little left over.

This ties right in to President Obama’s proposed $500,000 cap on executive salaries at bailed out banks. Every million that these guys earn is 25 median incomes. We need that money for job creation, not plumping Swiss bank accounts. If I threw lightning, these executives would earn median income and not a dime more until their appallingly mismanaged companies got off the federal teat. In the real world, I’ll take the $500k cap.