Bonus Rage: Lame-o Lefties Lose Again

The bonus revolt is going to peter out. The Senate is going to let the bonus tax die--cooler heads have prevailed. In New York, the state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, has persuaded nine of the top 10 bonus babies, all of them mightily rich, to give back the dough--meaning everybody will claim victory and shortly get on about their business.

For better or worse, mob anger, when coming from the left, is pretty lame. The economic world as we know it may be ending, but the left can't summon the kind of furies that got us into Iraq, declared war on terrorism, made the nation crazy about abortion, and gave gay marriage its buzzword name.

This is partly because the left's outrage is centered around economic issues. And economic issues are too complicated for bankers to understand, let alone earnest social studies teachers and anarcho college students. The fight against abortion has a lot more oomph and clarity than the fight against derivatives. What's more, the middle-class fist that needs to be raised in support of left-wing anger goes limp as soon as the stock market goes up. Five hundred points quells a lot of outrage. There's probably a formula: Liberals, being an optimistic bunch, need at least double the loss to undo half as much gain (or something like that).

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