Bailouts and Bonuses: The Money-Changers Win Again

Among the most perplexing occurrences in this season of bailouts as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson scrambles to prop up the economy by staggeringly large infusions of cash to banks that apparently have flushed their own money down their gilded toilets is the payment of bonuses to the bankers running these banks.  The New York Times, in an excellent analysis sure to provoke either outrage or something like "yeah, that's about right," reports that "[s]crutinty over pay is intensifying as banks like Merrill prepare to dole out bonuses even after they have had to be propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers' money."  See "On Wall Street, Bonuses, Not Profits, Were Real."  Say that again: "propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers' money."  

The explanation I've most seen for this perplexing development is that the banks will not be able to attract or keep top financiers, if they do not pay out bonuses.  And, of course, without top financiers these institutions, which are "propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers' money," would be imperiled or more endangered of failing and therefore losing billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.  

But my problem is this: aren't we paying these bonuses to the same bankers that ran their banks into the ground requiring that they be "propped up with billions of dollars of taxpayers' money?"  If this is true, it seems that these bankers are not the finance talent that should be attracted and retained to save the banks, the billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, and the good sense that somewhere, someday, somehow grants someone the good sense to say Enough is Enough.