Executive Pay Limit

By Dale McFeatters

Scripps Howard News Service

President Obama's plan to limit compensation to $500,000 for top Wall Street execs accepting taxpayer money is, looked at from a certain perspective ― not our perspective, mind you ― cruel and even sadistic.

Allen Salkin of the New York Times styles section, which takes a deep interest in these matters, has calculated what it costs to keep Wall Street's best and brightest living in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Not that that was a particularly arduous feat ― the chauffeur, the house in the Hamptons, the private schools, the ski vacation. Most of the rest of us could master it in under a week.

Salkin lists a few of the basic expenses: $32,000 a year per kid for private school; $45,000 a year for the nanny; $96,000 a year for the mortgage, plus another $96,000 in co-op fees.

``We're already at $269,000 and we haven't even got to taxes yet," Salkin writes with a certain glee. Curious thing about those taxes. For a family of four struggling to get by on $500,000 a year, federal, state and local taxes come to $269,000 a year. Our banker is, to use a couple of phrases we've been force to learn recently, is ``under water" or ``upside down" on his salary.

Throw in the car and driver, the personal trainer, the gowns, the charity balls and the Brooks Brothers suits, and we're closing in on $2 million for basic maintenance.

One observer of bankers on Manhattan's Upper East Side said that with salaries of $2 million to $3 million a year, these struggling financiers end the year at zero. It's just as well. If they had saved anything, their bank would have lost it in the market.

Apparently, moving to the suburbs, putting the kids in public school and taking public transportation is not an option, simply unthinkable. Obama might as well be sending them to Guantanamo Bay.

It just goes to show you: The over-privileged have their problems, too.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).