18 billion dollars in bonuses.

“Wall Street” is a movie set in 1985 about the greed and corruption involved in the market required to make so much money you cannot possibly spend it. A famous quote from the movie is “Greed is good” referring to how greed is what built our country and greed is how we can make it stronger ten-fold. Today we have our own crisis about greed in the market in the form of bonuses being given out to companies in an accumulative 18 billion dollars. It was a recently disclosed to me that Nevada is the leading state in foreclosures, leaving 1 in 10 students in Clark County alone functionally homeless. The fact that 18 billion dollars in tax money if not personal money would be given away to workers with enough of a salary to live off of, while people in Nevada are helpless because their jobs were terminated and there literally are no jobs left to take, is a disgusting fact to me. One billion dollars by itself could do so much good in this state let alone this county that it could truly make a heavy impact, but is given out as incentive to those who should have enough of an incentive already being in such a high profit industry. You don’t see professors asking for bonuses year by year just as an incentive to continue teaching; you don’t see waitresses and waiters asking for an extra 100,000 a year just so they can continue to properly serve those who they should be already. It’s a gross understatement to state that you should be paid an extra accumulative 18 BILLION dollars just so you can continue to properly do your job and earn your own money. There should be an addition to the Madoff smash doll in the form of the executives of AIG who decided it would be a good plan to imploy RIT's to banks left and right until the path was lost and the financial system folded into itself.