Dear DreadPirate_80,

There are two points that I believe are worth making here. First is that Mr. Rubenstein states that being employed at a private equity firm requires "hard work" not just financial engineering. So we're not just talking about work, it has been qualified as hard work, a horse of an entirely different color. I suppose we could now embark on a parsing of the word hard but I feel that most people would agree that coal mining is hard work and number crunching is not. Secondly, 25K an hour seems a bit excessive for any type of work no matter how hard. But that isn't what is most bothersome to me. What gets my personal goat is the mere 15% tax they are required to pay on that "hard" earned dough. Would you please tell me how that is equitable?