who in his column this morning wrote, as quoted by bobswern,
…In short, we’re giving huge sums to the financial industry while receiving little or nothing — maybe less than nothing — in return. Mr. Philippon puts the waste at 2 percent of G.D.P. Yet even that figure, I’d argue, understates the true cost of our bloated financial industry. For there is a clear correlation between the rise of modern finance and America’s return to Gilded Age levels of inequality.
The following was written as a comment to bobswern's diary, but is buried so far down the thread I thought I would offer it as a stand-alone, and perhaps flesh it out a bit more:
Krugman thinks the 2% of GDP is low
the estimates for our GDP as of January were 17.4 Trillion dollars.
each percent, therefore, is 174 Billion.
Two percent would be 348 Billion dollars.
if three percent, that would be 522 billion - more than half a trillion.  
Now consider how much we need the following items, not getting funded by Wall Street:
infrastructure repair
 - roads
 - bridges
 - dams
 - tunnels
 - school buildings  (over 150 billion for this alone)
long term unemployment
affordable health care for all
class size reduction in schools
and that list would go on
We have a system in which public money is spent primarily when it benefits those who already have it, and enables them to make more.
I said primarily.  
Because I include tax expenditures
Those tax expenditures include the lower tax rates given to hedge fund operators, as well as the obscenely low rate of capital gains
Those tax expenditures also include our refusal to enact a financial transactions tax
We have the further refusal to extend the notion of Thoughts inspired by Paul Krugman: