“With AIG making the headlines every day, Obama making friends with Jay Leno, and the dollar making, well, a mess, the economic crisis is panning out as yet another Washington D.C. soap opera. Until you realize that it’s happening in your backyard. The AIG part, at least.”
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With AIG making the headlines every day, Obama making friends with Jay Leno, and the dollar making, well, a mess, the economic crisis is panning out as yet another Washington D.C. soap opera.
Until you realize that it’s happening in your backyard. The AIG part, at least.
For all the spring breakers, you may have missed the Akron Beacon Journal’s article on March 15th. Good for you; you got to enjoy your spring break. For the second time in this short year, Proenza received-you guessed it-a bonus.
Sorry, excuse me. There’s an economic recession going on-we’re calling them performance payments now. $85,000 worth of them.
Oh, they say, he deserves it though. He’s such a great president, and he donates some of it back, anyway. He’s done so much-look at all the pretty gardens and the rise in enrollment.
Well, he might have been part of it.
But, I must say, I don’t think I would have been convinced to go to school here just by seeing him in a commercial.
All joking aside, let’s reconsider Proenza’s position in this sweeping whirlwind drama.
Rather than placing him in the hated position of the AIG bonus holders, let’s put him in Obama’s position. Proenza wants to lower our tuition, and Obama wants to lower our taxes. Obama plants gardens, and well, I suppose Proenza plants them too with a less hands-on approach. Perhaps he’ll even mumble something about being bad at bowling. He’s trying to do a good job; we’ll give him that.
But now let’s pretend that Obama took even the slightest raise tomorrow-let’s say Congress decides to give him the $85,000 bonus amidst his angry calls for AIG stockholders to return their bonuses. Imagine what the New York Times and Maureen Dowd would have to say. Jay Leno and Obama wouldn’t ‘hang out’ in the same context of last Thursday, Vogue would stop reporting on what Michelle Obama was wearing, and Sasha and Malia dolls would start selling two for one.
The people of Akron, however, are so sheltered-or brainwashed-that no one knows what to think. They see the stadium going up and just assume that since there is nothing they can do about it, they might as well congratulate him. So let’s look at the details, since the simple existence of the bonus doesn’t seem to bother enough people.
First of all, Proenza gets a lot. A normal person could live on about $10,000 a year with what he gets in amenities-a house, a car, 22 days of vacation plus an extra month in the summer to do absolutely nothing.
Oh wait-some live on that much a year, anyway-without all that.
So basically, he’s sitting $354,000 a year, donating on average a whopping 3 percent of it. Add all his bonuses, and he’s making $535,000-60th in the country, in fact, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s better than the president of University of California Berkeley by almost $100,000.
It’s really unthinkable that he could even accept the public money when our tuition is in danger of rising and a very low percentage of this year’s graduates are actually finding jobs.
I don’t care how well the university has done-this money could go to people who actually need and deserve it more than him.
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