What Can We Do About Goldman?

Goldman Sachs, one of the companies America went into deep hock to rescue in the last year, has announced it will pay $23 billion in bonuses to its managers. Think about that. We're left holding the sack of stuff they created, good people are out of work all across the country, and these guys are wondering if their Palm Beach house is big enough.

Frank Rich isn't happy about that, quoting Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who famously calls Goldman Sachs a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Rich thinks the reason Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner can't deal with them is because he "marinates in the culture." Rich might be right.

But British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is angry about it:

Ministers are drawing up plans for a tax raid on Britain’s banks worth hundreds of millions of pounds, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The radical move, being considered as a way of forcing banks to pay a price for the taxpayer-funded bail-out of the financial system, could include a one-off “windfall” tax on profits.

Kevin Drum's approach seems imminently reasonable:

I don't know if a one-off windfall profits tax is the right approach to this, and I don't think it should be motivated by anger in any case. The rescue plan put in place last year was bound to make the banking sector pretty profitable in the short run, so it's hardly a surprise that that's what happened. Nonetheless, there's no reason the industry as a whole shouldn't be expected to help pay for its own rescue one way or another. There's certainly no reason the taxpayers should do it all.

Indeed.