Retain the cream of the crop? The milk has soured and is rotting.

Compensation consultants are so full of it. I get that they're now in survival mode themselves since they helped feed this distorted system of bonuses, but c'mon, this is nuts. The new approach is to throw in secretaries and IT workers, as if their bonuses are even remotely in the same league as the financial genius' who are easily pulling in hundreds of thousands, often millions, per year in bonus money. Fine. Let's pull out those workers from the picture and let's see how much higher the average bonus really is above $112,000. Go ahead and then see how well America responds.

The other weak claim from the apologist crowd is that people depend on their bonus and that it's a contractual obligation. Oh really. And what does that contractual obligation have to say about their business going bankrupt and requiring billions to keep them in business? Yes? Did I hear something? You were saying? It's easy to sympathize with the non-financial people who make much less though again, they are already making similar money to other businesses *before* they receive their bonus. It's not clear why everyone else has to foot the bill for these bonuses when they're just as worried about their own jobs and whether or not they will be told there will be salary cuts. It's not 2006, it's a post-bubble world so accept it or try your luck elsewhere.

CNBC also has joined the fight to defend the bonus culture, inviting a Wall Street "legend" who defends the bonuses by telling us that "others like sports stars or movie stars" do it too. Perhaps they do, but did they cause the collapse of the global economy? This "legend" is as off as Rudy Giuliani, who thinks we need bonuses so that restaurants in NYC can stay in business. Is it now the American way to reward failure with billions of dollars of federal money? Isn't that socialism for the elite? How about we reward success? Wall Street experienced an expansion in pay leading up to the Great Depression as well and that eventually leveled out as money dried up. Maybe Wall Street banksters want to pay back the previous bonus money that was paid despite it being taken off the books? Screw the lot of them and bring on McCaskill's plan. Take it or leave it.