The recent spat of the AIG bonuses serves as an excellent example for why I think tools like the Google Visualization Toolkit API are important. Here are the basic facts. AIG received something on the order of 170 billion dollars from the US government. That is A LOT of money. They then paid executives, including executives who helped cause the mess, 165 million dollars in bonuses.
In was, politically, stupid as hell. In the middle of a financial crisis, you don't reward failure. In fact, I don't understand why a company would ever reward failure, but that's not really the point.
My point is that this got BLOWN wAY oUt oF PrOpOrTiOn. Click on the convenient picture to get a graphical understanding of AIG's financial malfeasance. A mere 165 million is a laughably small proportion of 170 billion, although it doesn't look like it until you stick in all the zeros.
Bailout - 170, 000, 000, 000.00
Bonuses - 165, 000, 000.00
I'm not going to sit here and defend the logic of rewarding failure. It doesn't deserve the effort. But, the resulting hoopla has been equally outrageous. To help us all understand this, let's break this down into numbers we have all dealt with. If I give you 100 dollars because you are in financial trouble, I am not going to worry too much if you spend 10 cents on a piece of bubble gum at Wal-Mart. The bubble-gum isn't actually necessary and is probably not a good use of the money I lent you, but it is nearly the exact same ration as the bonuses paid by AIG. It is literally pennies on the dollar.
For the Precision Nazis - I rounded. It would be more accurate to say that it would be as if you spent 9.7 cents of the $100.
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