There are a few issues here. When you get paid, that money probably gets deposited into a bank. When you start a family, you probably take out life insurance to

There are a few issues here. When you get paid, that money probably gets deposited into a bank. When you start a family, you probably take out life insurance to make sure that if something happens to you, your family will be financially stable. When mortgage rates fall, you can refinance the mortgage on your house. Those are all financial services provided to you by private industry, and since people use them extensively, I think its fair to say that they are real contributions to the economy. Now you can argue that Wall St. guys are overpaid, have bad incentives, etc. But it is much tougher to argue that politicians should be arbitrarily limiting pay in certain currently-unpopular industries. That introduces distortions, and it does it at the worst possible time. Can you imagine if there were legal limits on startup profits in response to the dot com bubble? Do you think we'd have all of these great enterprises like Facebook, Twitter & YC? And the idea that it was done through a late night ammendment to the stimulus bill by an ethically challenged senator such that congressmen and congresswoman didn't even know that they were voting for these limits is just terrible. Don't get me wrong: It is also terrible that for the last two decades a lot of our best engineers have gone into finance, rather than building cool stuff, but it sure looks like that is unwinding on its own.