Many years ago I read a cartoon in Mad Magazine by Dave Berg (I think). In the first panel, there was this president of a company, who came out of his office and started yelling at all the workers at their desks, saying, "who used the company phone to make a long-distance call for $4.87?"
In the next panel, one of his assistants came up to him and said, "Mr. Johnson, you and this company deal in million-dollar transactions many times each day. Why are you expending energy, or even caring, about a long-distance call for $4.87?"
In the next panel, the president looks thoughtfully up at the ceiling and says, "you know, a million dallars is such a vast amount of money that it’s really hard to comprehend how much money that is…"
And in the final panel, this boss person says, "But $4.87! That I understand!"
The reason I mention this old cartoon is that, over and over again, I’m hearing various pundits asking the question, "where is the outrage?" I have many theories on this subject. But a very big part of it is, like the guy in the cartoon above, even if we had all the facts and figures, it’s very hard to fully grasp just exactly what it is these fraudulent bankers have done in terms of the amounts of money they have squandered. (As one congressman once said, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.")
It seemed so odd to me that there was so much uproar over the AIG bonuses, as it was such a paltry amount compared to what some people stole. But in the context of the cartoon above, it starts to make sense. $50 billion, or $2 trillion, these are amounts so vast that it’s really hard to comprehend just how much money that is. But $160 million in bonuses…
"THAT I understand!!"
