Wealth Beyond the Dreams of Avarice

Want to get a tantalizing glimpse of the new American aristocracy? Here's a video put out by the NY Times to excite you about a report they have on the incredible wealth that the "partners" at the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs makes:



Goldman Sachs paying $17 billion to their staff this year. If you check Wikipedia, they have 34,000 employees. On the surface, this says the average employee gets paid half a million dollars a year. But you can be assured that something like 20,000 of the "employees" are low level flunkies paid something far closer to minimum wage than a half million bucks (say $50,000 for these eats up $1B of the $17B). So my crude guess is that there is something like 14,000 employees splitting $16 billion. But again. Most of these are lower level traders and analysts who don't get the big bucks. Say 10,000 of these get $200,000 a year. This is a king's ransom in my books, but only $2B off the remaining $16B. So we get down to 4,000 fat cats who cut up $14B. Again, assume 3,000 of these are big shots, but not in the inner circle of "partner" and say these guys get two-thirds of a million dollars each. That eats up another $2B. That means the remaining 2,000 partners carve up $12B, or they get $6 million each on average. But even among this elite 2,000 there is probably a hierarchy. Say 1,800 get $2.5M on average. This leaves $7.5B for the top 200 "partners" or $37.5M each. But, even among these 200 there is an elite...

The problem with chasing money is that there is always somebody with more of it than you have. You will never be happy.

The tragedy is that all those Wall Street millionaires never stop to think of the tens of millions of Americans who struggle on a minimum wage of $7 to $8 per hour, or roughly $16,000 per year. To be taking home over $1M you simply can't comprehend the struggles that a person trying to make do on $16,000 faces. So the rich in America ignore the poor. Instead, the rich busy themselves demanding that their taxes be lowered and when this causes deficits for governments, they demand that government services for the middle classes and the working classes be cut. And this only makes the gulf between those getting multi-millions in income and the working poor grow wider. A tragedy!