Pay brouhaha not even worth 1 percent of our time

Do the math: $165 million (the size of the headline-grabbing bonuses paid to some American International Group Inc employees) is what percent of $183 billion (the amount of government bailout money that has gone to AIG)? It comes out to 0.09016 percent.

Immaterial. Trifling.

Yet the uproar from the White House to the streets of Manhattan and Connecticut suggests the payments will be the ruin of America. Congress is even considering a possibly illegal bill to tax the bonuses after the fact.