!! Obama: "The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all the kindergarten teachers in the country."
— Nedra Pickler (@nedrapickler) May 12, 2015During his remarks on poverty at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Obama noted the discrepancy in pay between two very different sets of workers…. 25 men — yes, they were all men — made about $464 million apiece, just a bit more than the teachers’ $53,000.
As absurd as the discrepancy in these numbers is, the President was correct. The top-earning 25 hedge fund managers in this country make significant more ($11.6 billion) than all of the approximately 158,000 kindergarten teachers ($8.5 billion) in the U.S.
So let’s be certain I have this straight: 25 hedge fund managers, who actually create nothing of tangible value (unless you consider creating paper wealth to be valuable) make significantly more money than EVERY. SINGLE. Kindergarten teacher. In the country. All 158,000…who actually do create something of value: our future. I can think of little that says more about our FUBARed collective values than this example. Teachers helping to create the future are paid a pittance, while hedge fund managers, who move numbers around on computers, make several orders of magnitude more. I have not the vocabulary to adequately express my dismay at just how thoroughly f——d up that is.
When the history of this era is written, it’s difficult to imagine it could be written accurately without focusing on the astonishing levels of greed and avarice…as well as the benign acceptance of it as the normal order of things.
If you’re curious, those investors make far less cumulatively than high school teachers. All 1.5 million high school teachers nationally earned about $870 billion in 2012 with a median salary of $56,643.
Well, there’s that we can feel good about…right??
Obama’s point, incidentally, was not overt class hostility toward the hedge funders. Instead, he wants to tax carried interest more. This will not, we estimate, make hedge fund compensation equivalent to that of a teacher.
When even our President seems not to be alarmed by this disparity and the twisted values it represents, do we really have any hope of being able to effect change? Or are we to be condemned to a system in which those who traffic in thin air and fairy dust are far more highly compensated than those who actually make a tangible impact on the present AND our future?
Even worse, when hedge fund managers can turn a tragedy like the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School into an opportunity to profit, are we not scraping the bottom of the barrel, morally speaking?
If you believe in karma as I do, you rest secure in the knowledge that those whose profits come at the expense of others will eventually be called to account. We can never know what shape or form that accounting will take, but I like to remember a very simple truism a very wise man once told me: Paybacks are a bitch.
We may be willing to tolerate greed and avarice in this world, but who knows what the next will hold? I get through my days riding on the belief that karma will out…someday. Somewhere. All I can do in the meantime is to try to be a better person. That’s a full time job in and of itself.
