Gaining a little perspective in the new year

I missed this a few days back. Perhaps you did, too:

What To Do With Your Goldman Sachs Bonus
Investment Firm Goldman Sachs Reported the Largest Profit in Wall Street History
by Mary Kathryn Burke and Elizabeth Kolleeny

Dec. 13, 2006 -- It was reported today that Wall Street's famed investment bank Goldman Sachs will be shelling out over $16 billion in bonuses this holiday season -- an average of over $600,000 per employee.

Many of those bonuses will be performance-based, so some of the company's bigwigs are likely to get as much as $100 million.

With all that cash coming in, it's easy to wonder what someone might buy with a $100 million holiday bonus.

You could provide immunizations for more than 40,000 impoverished children for a year ($37.5 million), then throw a birthday party for your daughter and one million of her closest friends ($60 million). You'd still have enough to buy a different color Rolls Royce for each day of the week ($2.5 million).

You could feed about 800,000 children for a year ($60 million), recreate the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston weddings four times over ($16 million), buy one of Mel Gibson's private islands ($15 million), and still remain a millionaire nine times over....

Here's the rest, if you can stomach it.

Here's to a safer, saner, more equitable and just 2007. For all of us -- not just Dubya's Chosen People.