Unemployment, and so on

[kandrathe]

The tricky part there is "becoming whatever they want ", because currently we have a whole bunch of educated career seekers who are not finding that they can become whatever they want.

Of course but that is not what we are discussing.

No, actually, it is exactly what we are discussing. Young people are unemployed, even the ones who borrowed money to go to Princeton. You can't just become whatever you want. The economy must also have a demand for your skills.

If golf wasn't so popular Tiger Woods wouldn't be a multimillionaire.

Whether you look at pro-sports legend, rock star, famous actor, CEO, or skilled commodities trader, they are all really really rare.

So, you take someone like Meg Whitman, who was born in 1956 and attended Cold Spring Harbor Public High School on Long Island. She was a very good student, and so she went to Princeton University, and got a BA in economics, then she went on to get an MBA at Harvard. Her dad, Hendricks Hallett Whitman, founded and was president of Clark Tyler Associates, a small company that makes commercial loans. Meg worked in management for various companies for about 20 years, moved to Disney in 89, and after 3 years she was promoted to vice president of strategic planning and development for the Walt Disney Company. Then, in the 90's, she started moving through top management positions in fortune 50 firms. My point is she is not like lady Gaga in terms of instant millionaire. She really worked and dedicated herself to a career for 35 years before she hit the upper tiers of management. Her family traces back to loyalist American colonists who fled to Nova Scotia, after the British gave up the US. She comes from a family who were comfortably well off, and so perhaps that lent to her success. But... she still had to work for most of what she has.

If the laws weren't the way they are someone would not be able to make 10s of millions of bonus a year just because he is very good in trading imaginary things at an investors bank. And not being affected at all when it turns out that the bank had gambled way wrong after which the government pays off all the debts with tax payers money.

I think it is reprehensible the way that Tim Geitner, and Hank Paulsen before him used the Federal treasury to let banks off the hook for their own bad decisions, and handed them billions of dollars that they've invested for their own profits at the expense of the economy. I think the Congress, and the President have made it possible for the same banks who otherwise would have crashed and gone out of business to have made obscene profits at tax payers expense (and at the expense of the economy).

But, still, you cannot make a silk purse from a sows ear. Bankers will act like bankers. If you give them money for sitting on excess reserves, they just might not loan out all that money you bailed them out with. The problem is the cavalier attitude our government has with our money.

If I give you $100 to go get me some groceries and you never get them. I'm not going to give you another $100. Likewise, we should have had strings attached to the handouts, such as, it's eventually getting paid back out of their profits. And, since they are bankers, they will understand the compounded interest we charge on their debt.