Soldiers Pay

Ben Stein wrote a commentary for today's New York Times. That's a registration required site but I'll quote from some of it:

"In the financial section of the newspaper or the business magazine, there is an article about a man, Philip J. Purcell, who has just left a huge financial services company after his performance was deemed subpar, and he's taking home a $113.7 million severance package.

Then there's an article about the fellow who is replacing him, and about how he was offered something like $25 million a year. A fellow on the job just three months, whose main quality was apparently loyalty to the subpar-performing manager, is getting $32 million.
And in a publication called Trader magazine, there's an article about the top hedge fund and commodities fund managers, and they are getting $250 million to $500 million a year each, personally.

And I think to my little self: "Wow, that's a ton of money. But I guess they do something very useful, helping to allocate capital and to make money for the shareholders and for the people who invest with them."

Then I turn from the financial news to the general news section of the paper, or to the barrage of e-mail messages I get from people in the Army and Navy and Marines and Air Force, and I read about men and women who are taking fire from insurgents in Iraq and being blown up by homemade bombs that the Pentagon refers to as improvised explosive devices. The people being blown up are maybe corporals, and they get $1,900 a month, including combat pay.

Or I read a letter from a buddy of a member of the Navy Seals who was killed recently in Afghanistan when his helicopter went down, and he was getting maybe $1,950 a month, fighting the Taliban and fighting Al Qaeda (which killed 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001). That means the guy at the hedge fund is getting as much as, say, 10,000 of these corporals per annum.

What keeps going through my mind is that there is a big, yet always unstated, connection between these two groups of men and women - on one hand, the megastars of Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, with their vast paychecks, yachts and horse farms in the Hamptons, and, on the other, the grunts in body armor chasing down terrorists half a world away in 130-degree heat."

I know the point's been made before but one does wonder what the $100 Million Man really sees when he looks in the mirror. Is the money enough to make him feel significant? Maybe it doesn't matter. Either way, I don't think the $1900 a month corporal will ever have that problem.