Jon Stewart On Wall Street Bonuses
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Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Wall Street Bonuses | ||||
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Daily Show Video: Clusterf*ck to the Poor House - Stewart on Wall Street bonuses:
- "I guess the only real difference between bankers and movie stars is when Nick Cage lost all his money, I didn't have to bail him out."
- "Let me get this straight, the only people who have recovered from the financial meltdown... are the people who caused this financial meltdown."
Pointing to the "we had to" argument for bailout supporters -- i.e. the line of thinking that says "we had to bail out the financial sector or our economic system would collapse" -- Stewart wondered why so many bankers furiously resisted placing any conditions on receiving bailout funds. Wall Street leaders, including former Treasury Chief Hank Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Stewart noted, argued that placing even the smallest requirements on bailout recipients such as the requirement to lend, would have been disastrous.
"I'm not an economist, but these are some fragile f$#@ing businesses. No, don't look the bank in the eye, it will fail! What, are our banks made out of balsa wood held together by baby tears?" Stewart joked.
Reader Comments (6)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dead-federal-retirees-are-paid-120-million-annually-report-says/2011/09/22/gIQAMjT0oK_story.html
A little dated.
http://www.thenorthwestreport.com/the-truth-about-terrorism-video/
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=239174
You wind up with a person basically being told that you’re unemployable now, we unfortunately have to leave you in that situation and that means the American dream is not for you. The other scenario is you say, you know your market clearing price is pretty low right now, it’s a buck an hour. So we’re going to hire you for a buck an hour and we’ll pay you a negative income tax of $7.00 bucks an hour, so you’re making $8.00. Is the employee going to care whether the eight bucks comes from the employer or largely from the government? Of course not.
Now what’s interesting is the share of the adult male population that was working back in the 50’s got as high as 93%, that’s pretty amazing, right now it’s 75%. That means we don’t have 9% unemployment we have 18% among men relative to the share that once worked. The largest share of the female adult population that worked was 72%, it’s now 64%. Okay, that’s pretty bad.
If you do the math and you say that (of the adult working age population) 93% of men could work, 72% of women could work, would work if they had nice job opportunities.
That means you’ve got 30 million people unemployed. Let’s take that negative income tax example, multiply it by 30 million people. The total cost of putting those 30 million people to work would be smaller than the 450 billion dollar stimulus that was proposed.
http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2011/9/22_Rob_Arnott_-_In_Worst_Depression_Since_The_Great_Depression.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8786314/Vladimir-Putin-on-course-to-be-Russias-next-president-as-Dmitry-Medvedev-steps-aside.html