An old cliché says: “Hard work always pays off.”
Really? Ask a farm worker about that, or talk to a McDonald’s fry cook working three shifts to piece together an income that still leaves them in poverty. “Work your fingers to the bone,” goes the old song, “and what do you get? Boney fingers.”
If it’s a big payoff you want from a job, go for what my Uncle Emmett called “soft hands work.” I recommend hedge-fund huckstering! Those guys (and they’re nearly all guys) never get a callus and do nothing of social value, yet they make the biggest haul of anyone. Last year, the 25 highest paid hedge funders raked in a collective $21 billion in personal pay, with half of that grabbed by the top four guys.
Their billions are what’s called “unearned income” – money made from money, not from one’s labor. And it’s not even their money! Other rich people, big pension funds, endowments, etc. entrust them with big piles of their money, which the soft hand guys then bet on such screwy “financial products” as packages of subprime-mortgage derivatives (yes, that’s the one that crashed our economy in 2008). But even when they bet poorly, the hucksters get richer, for they charge what’s called “2 and 20” to get into their casino game – that’s 2 percent off the top of the millions of dollars a person or group turns over to the hedge fund, plus 20 percent of any profits made from the bets. So a guy like Ray Dalio, who runs the world’s biggest hedge game, made a lousy showing for his backers last year, yet he still walked away with $600 million in personal pay.
Also, to further rig the unearned income game, the hedge-crew is lobbying furiously in Washington to let them get away with paying only half the income tax rate that you working stiffs are assessed. Why do we even allow these worthless scoundrels to exist?

“Hedge Fund Moguls’ Pay Has the 1% Looking Up,” The New York Times, May 6, 2014.

How income inequality happens

Where’s Charles Dickens when we need him? The novelist, who laid bare the shame of gross income inequality in 19th century England, came up with some perfectly-fitting names for his fat cat characters, including Scrooge, Mr. Tulkinghorn, Miss Havisham, and Nickleby. So I’m wondering what moniker Dickens would’ve given to Robert Marcus.
He’s the CEO of Time Warner Cable who has just won gold in the Greed Olympics for Grabbing the Most Gold with the Least Effort in the Shortest Time. Marcus became chief of the cable company on January 1st, and he immediately reached out to his corporation’s biggest rival, Comcast, offering to sell Time Warner to that giant. Only six weeks later, the deal was done.
Why would a CEO rush to eliminate both his corporation and his own job? Perhaps because of a lucrative little provision in the contract he signed to become Time Warner’s honcho. It’s a CCC – a “change of control clause.” This is yet another way for CEOs to feather their own nest, for a CCC hands a big golden parachute to the top executive of a corporation that gets sold.
In this case, Robert pockets $80 million. Yes, that’s roughly $1.8 million a day for each of about 45 days he “worked” to sell off the company.
What we have here is a perverse form of incentive pay for corporate chieftains. Rather than rewarding them for outcompeting their rivals, a CCC encourages them to sidle up to their competitors and whisper: “Psssst, wanna buy my corporation?”
Not only did Marcus sell off Time Warner, but his self-serving deal will also sell out untold numbers of its employees who’ll be made “redundant” by the merger. We hear about America’s widening gap in income inequality, but here we can actually see it widen – one rich man gains an extra $80 million, and hundreds of workers lose their income.

“$80 Million for 6 Weeks for Cable Chief,” The New York Times, March 20, 2014.