The idea that there's some substantive difference between:
OBAMA: I DON'T 'BEGRUDGE' BIG BANK CEOS FOR THEIR MASSIVE BONUSES
and
I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.
is silly.
First off, the framing of the information comes not from Ariana Huffington, but from Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t "begrudge" the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
Second, let's look at what Obama said in a little more context:
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is "an extraordinary amount of money" for Main Street, "there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well."
"I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen," Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. "I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system."
Clearly, he's not just expressing a general opinion on wealth, but rather framing, and so justifying, the massive post-bailout bonuses in terms of a general, and he proposes widely shared, opinion. That may be enough to through the likes of Kestrel9000 off his meaning, but his meaning is actually obvious. Bloomberg expressed it succinctly and the HuffPo echoed that summation. Obama doesn't begrudge bank execs their massive bonuses.
That he doesn't do so out of a general attitude regarding wealth actually compounds the problem with his statement, which Krugman sums up as "clueless." The professor explains why:
First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.
And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. ...
The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state.