Meet The Press is no longer the same without him. Don’t get me wrong, David Gregory is a good journalist, but he doesn’t have anything close to TIm’s talents. Actually, the only one I see at NBC with the deep, intellectual everydayness that Tim had is Chuck Todd, and I think that he would have made the best possible Meet The Press host, rather than have him sit at the White House and try to trip up Robert Gibbs.

But that is not what I was going to write about, and I’m sure that Tim Russert would have been a big enough man to accept any role and then make it into something extraordinary. Tim, when I doubt myself and find the going tough, I think of you, your enthusiasm and the enourmous warmth you spread around you, and it inspires me. I’m sure you continue to inspire and influence other people too, so in a way, there is no reason to miss you. You are always here.

Sheesh! If $6.2 million is equivalent to a year’s salary, that person should have been fired on the spot for getting AIG into the situation they were. And what does congress do? They do what they should have done long ago. They make sure that there is a law that caps the payments for companies getting bailed out by public funds. After all, the alternative is bankruptcy, which would pay most people very little, if anything. But the irony of the House of Congress bill is that that most of the AIG Finance people are located in London, UK, and as far as I know they are not affected by US tax law. So they still get their money untouched. All this while AIG is suing the IRS to get some tax money back. They are suing their majority owner. That’s some cojones.

So how much money are we talking about?

I started to ponder how much money we’re talking about, so I made a thought experiment. I took $6,400,000 and paid 35% income tax on that. That left me with $4,160,000, which I put into one of those GMAC CDs they are advertising on television. The guarateed one year interest rate is 2.85%, so better than a general savings account, but probably not the best investment you can make. Anyway, after a year I would have $118,560 in interest. That is a reasonable salary in itself. Especially when you take into account that in 2007 the US median salary was $31,400 and the average was $40,700. So we’re talking 4 times the median and 3 times the average US salary. OK, New York region is actually about 25% higher with $39,100 as the median and $50,800 as the average (http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm). Now I hear some people grumbling that these are experts in their field and they deserve more. OK, so let’s say they are Financial Managers (which for all practical purposes should be the people they are reporting to). Then the picture looks like this. US median $95,300, US average$106,200. In the New York area these people are paid about 35% more than the national average, so that statistic is median $132,300 and average $141,900. So now the interest is slighly less than the salary of their average boss, but still more than Airline Pilots who nationally earn $113,900 on average. In New York there must be mainly part time pilots, because they only earn 61% of that. Even the $4,000,000 bonus recipients would get the tidy sum of $74,100 in interest. Still more than the New York average and considering that capital gains is taxed lower than work it is actually worth more.

So how about the CEOs?

Another good question. They are not immune to this ballooning pay schedule. Average salary for Chief Executives nation wide is $151,400 and in the New York region it’s 25% higher at $189,300. Note that the difference for Chief Execs in percent is the same as for all workers. Finance managers earn relatively more in the Big Apple. Now we come to how much some of the bailed out CEOs were getting. I have taken the 2007 amounts from http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/database.cfm and I have used the lower of their two measures to make sure that I don’t fan the flames. At least not more than necessary. I have also thrown in a few other CEOs to get more perspective. Here we go:

So, judging by this Lloyd Blankfein is at least 40 times as good a CEO as Steve Ballmer, or even five times better than John Chambers. I will not even mention Warren Buffet.

Well, this was 2007, and in 2008 a lot of things happened and some of these CEOs lost their jobs.  Like Stan O’Neill of Merrill Lynch. He lost his job and reportedly (wikipedia) got a severance packet valued at the time of about $161,500,000.  If he paid 35% tax and put it in a GMAC CD at today’s interest rate that would bring him almost $3,000,000. And that would be able to continue.

Every.

Single.

Year.

Some of the other CEOs that had to leave their post were Martin Sullivan of AIG, who got a much smaller severance. His was only worth $25,400,000 or $47,000,000 depending on sources. But even the lower amount would bring in $470,000 per year in my investment scheme. Charles Prince of Citigroup reportedly got $38,000,000, which would give a GMAC return of about $700,000. Ken Thompson of Wachovia had to settle for the measly sum of $8,700,000, which if reinvested my way would give about $160,000 per annum.

Some of them were of course less fortunate. Kerry Killinger of WaMu didn’t get anything when FDIC stepped in , and Richard Syron of Freddie Mac and Dan Mudd of Fannie Mae also had their severance packets taken away. Didn’t they have contracts? :-O

To me these numbers are all obscene. Are these people really contributing that much to society? Are they really worth it? Just to reiterate.

Of all the workers in the USA, the median income is $31,400, and the average income is $40,700. And for those who are not sure what the median is. It’s the middle value, meaning that there are as many people who earn more than $31,400 as there are people earning less than $31,400. And I’m pretty sure that that latter half don’t have as good health care coverage as the other half either.

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I made a quick calculation on this. What about if this was the full year’s salary, and not just the cream on top? What if you were to hire this person out as a consultant, since the person i question has to be absolutely brilliant to deserve such a salary?

Long time ago I learned a very rough rule-of-thumb for how much you had to charge a client for a consultant. The rule was that you would have to charge about 3 times the salary you paid to cover for all the other costs involved (including the risk of having them sitting on the bench).

So how much is $6,500,000 really if you start to break it down? Well it’s $125,000 per week, or $25,000 per day if you assume a 5 hour work week. If you then assume 8 hour work days we get to $3,125 per hour.  So to hire a person earning that amount of money as a consultant would require you to pay roughly $10,000 per hour.

If you need somebody I’m available…

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But more than a few of the New York-based financial executives who would have their pay limited are men (and they are almost invariably men) whose identities are entwined with living a certain way in a certain neighborhood west of Third Avenue: a life of private schools, summer houses and charity galas that only a seven-figure income can stretch to cover.

Well, if you have done your job in such a way that you have run not only your company, but the whole economy into the dumpster, then maybe you have to realize that you just have to stop living in luxury with a home in the “right” place, summer houses and kids in private schools. Not to mention stop running to galas.

An accountant quoted in the piece, Martin Cohen shows that after taxes a poor person earning only $500,000 would take home $269,000 per year. And then the article goes on to explain how you need your apartment for $200,000, your summer house for $250,000, your driver for $125,000, your personal trainer for $12,000, your garage at $10,000, etc. ad infinitum. Oh, I forgot, yearly vacations for $16,000, private school for $65,000 and a nanny at almost $50,000.

If this is meant as satire I think it’s not sharp enough. If it’s not, then the revolution is not far away.

Oh, and the article says that a middle class salary in NYC is about $125,000, so getting paid 4 times average middle class is not good enough for the people who after running the economy into the ground probably doesn’t even deserve to be on par with the average working man or woman.

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Anyway, the result is in, and now we can all focus on getting Senator Obama elected. That will take unification in the Democratic Party, as well as people pulling together to get some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt to Senator Clinton paid off.

 I’m happy with the result.

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In the last few weeks we have all seen signs of strong political campaigning from all leading Democrat candidates, and until recently I would say that I also admired Hillary Clinton, because she is a very professional and competent politician. However, the last week has made me change my mind. It’s not that she is no longer professional and competent. It’s more that she is so old school when it comes to campaigning.

We now have a choice between “divide and conquer” and “unite and improve”. You will have to guess which candidate stands for which.

I remember last time there was a new president and everybody voted for him because he seemed like the kind of guy you’d like to sit down and have a beer with (disregarding the fact that he has some serious drinking problems, and probably would be fine with some pop and pretzels). Huckabee, damnit you’d like him to come to all your parties, that how well he comes across. I think those are fine qualities, but not the ones that we should use to elect the most powerful man in the world.

Mike Huckabee wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade and defends it by saying that he thinks we should disallow abortions because American people value the life of one as if it’s the life of all. I assume that means all the mothers who don’t want the child for whatever reason. It’s also ironic that he supports death penalty, but I guess that is one kind of life that has no value.

I also have a big problem with somebody who wants to even discuss creationism at the same time as evolution, and even worse wants to get students to have to suffer through it. Science is about observing and drawing conclusions. Evolution is therefore supported by science, since we can experience evolution ourselves. Just look at virii during cold and flu season.

Huckabee has also shown himself to be ignorant about things like the National Intelligence Estimate and the current writers’ strike, and he comes off as almost proud of being ignorant. If he wasn’t such a good speaker that would probably have killed his political career long time ago, not to mention his religious one.

There are some positions where I think he’s not that bad, and other areas where I think he might not have thought through the issue in enough detail.

Oh, and for the record, I don’t care whether somebody is a religous believer or not, I think that as long as there are morals and ethics that align with doing the best for the American people, then the president can believe what he or she wants. Actually, the less it’s talked about the better.