There
is certainly no shortage of reasons to bash the New York Times, but
we've personally always felt a little protective of what is arguably
one of the last vestiges of real print media. And then we read this
Sunday Styles piece on the financial difficulties of surviving on
$500,000 a year. Cue the sound of one teeny, tiny violin...
The author, Allen Salkin, is taking on Obama's threat to cap Wall Street executive pay at $500,000 -- for those firms that accepted bailout funds.
PRIVATE school: $32,000 a year per student.
Mortgage: $96,000 a year.
Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year.
Nanny: $45,000 a year.
We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet.
Salkin makes some fair points -- these executives have committed to a standard of living that they can't realistically change over night, without some serious and dramatic ramifications. Expecting them to move or pull their children out of school, for example, is a little drastic. But Salkin's tally of some more exendable expenditures is more than a little gauche, like, let's say, designer dresses and personal trainers:
A personal trainer at $80 an hour three times a week comes to about $12,000 a year.
The
work in the gym pays off when one must don a formal gown for a charity
gala. “Going to those parties,” said David Patrick Columbia, who is the
editor of the New York Social Diary (newyorksocialdiary.com),
“a woman can spend $10,000 or $15,000 on a dress. If she goes to three
or four of those a year, she’s not going to wear the same dress.”
It's not unreasonable to expect, in this day and age, that an $80 personal Pilates class can be cut, or a custom Proenza Schouler dress re-worn. But the biggest hole in Salkin's math is where he allows that even their multi-million dollar salaries can barely cut it, especially when the allowed assertion is coming from "the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, The Manny," who happens to also be the privileged spawn of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. Salkin quotes:
"As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East
Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves
in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards
and mortgage bills that are inescapable."
And there's the problem. Not only are these the people who, by all accounts, failed miserably at handling the financials of millions, they also failed miserably at their own. Are we wrong here, or should executives with multi-million dollar salaries have been able, at some point, to cobble together some form of savings? Perhaps enough, say, to cover themselves should they have to take a pay cut? Why on earth should we be feeling so sorry for these Wall Street warriors who have spent the last lucrative years spending money so far beyond their means?
Well, Candace Bushnell, whose sage advice we all should be heeding (WHAT?), claims that it's not about the money. It's about the lifestyle:
Does this money buy a chief executive stockholders might prize, a
well-to-do man with a certain sureness of stride, something that might
be lost if the executive were crowding onto the PATH train every
morning at Journal Square, his newspaper splayed against the back of a
stranger’s head?
The man would certainly not feel like himself on that train, said Candace Bushnell, the author of “Sex and the City” and other books chronicling New York social mores.
“People
inherently understand that if they are going to get ahead in whatever
corporate culture they are involved in, they need to take on the
appurtenances of what defines that culture,” she said. “So if you are
in a culture where spending a lot of money is a sign of success, it’s
like the same thing that goes back to high school peer pressure. It’s
about fitting in.”
You know, she's not wrong. It IS about fitting in -- just this time both the bankers and the New York Times should be attempting to do it with the rest of the world.
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