Banker's pay is just another tax

I'm just as miffed as many other people were over the recent announcement that banks will be raising salaries for employees that will restore their earnings back to their 2007 level. Like in this NY Times article or in many of the other ones around the same time.
Not that I'm angry about people getting paid a high amount of money, if you're doing good work and bringing in lots of value, I don't have a problem with salaries at an average of 1/2 a million dollars per year.

The main issue is that it's my tax dollars that are supporting this industry and that it's not good value that they're bringing in. Financial institutions need to provide a fluid financial market to let
borrowers and investors connect. An investment bank is not the group that puts together circuit boards and aluminum to make iPods, it connects the financial forces to let a company get enough capital to put them together, and market them, and sell them, and service them, and everything.

It's like in my own industry in the media & advertising world. The media business is a connector, it doesn't really produce anything. Like if Huggies diapers wanted to get their commercials on some shows on ABC Family, they'd pay a media company to negotiate the 15 or 30 second spots but the media company doesn't create the TV commercials, nor does it manufacture diapers. The media company takes it's cut and connects the 2 happy parties.

Both are still valuable services so why am I annoyed at the pay? Well, I happen to also be a techie and I love it when technical innovations drive down the cost and makes it easier to do things yourself. The newspapers have seen much of their media dollars erode from people
advertising on search engines. Google even goes as far as to make it simple to bid on your own advertising terms and target them on where they should appear. The niftyness of Google ads is that it makes it easy to see your customers and it's very visible on how your ads appear and your advertising dollars are spent in their auction system, driving prices down and changing the way media companies work.

With the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into the banking industry to preserve 1/2 million dollar salaries; I think we're about time for the same change in the way we do financial services. Right now the mess of regulations and multi-million dollar lobbying efforts is keeping this system at the status quo. If there's enough political will to open up & simplify the banking system then we can create a platform for smaller and more competitive financial
innovations instead of mega corps that are too big to fail.

So instead of being worried about losing your top employees and paying out billions of my tax dollars; I say let them go! Start something new and then give me a good value for my money.