[eridius]

Not really. Any money you make above cost of living is effectively discretionary cash. And it doesn't cost money to get a raise. But with a business, it usually costs money to make money. As a trivial example, if you have a company with razor-thin margins, lets say 1% margin, then you can have very large revenue, such as $86b, but not a lot of profit (in this case $860m). And that doesn't even take staffing and fixed costs into account, which would drive that number significantly lower.

Or to put it another way, you can run a company such that you roughly break even, at which point it doesn't matter what your revenue is, $185m is still a big number. In that case hopefully you have a lot of discretion as to how you spend your money such that you can just spend less in one area to account for the $185m, but if you're breaking even because you can't do any better, as opposed to breaking even because you're putting all your profit back into R&D, then $185m might be hard to deal with.

All that said, for a company like Wells Fargo, it probably is basically just a slap on the wrist.

[metaphorm]

an individual's "discretionary income" can also be used as savings or investment. you're argument doesn't make any sense.

[eridius]

Well yes, it's discretionary. That's what discretionary means - you can use it for whatever you want. Using it for savings or investment in no way invalidates my argument, because that's exactly what I'm talking about. If you have a bunch of money in savings, then getting hit with a $215 fine isn't a big deal, you can pull that small amount of money out and pay it. But the whole point is that since the extra "revenue" you get from a higher salary is discretionary, then you should be able to easily absorb a small fine, but a company with large revenues doesn't necessarily have a lot of discretionary cash.

Now it's certainly possible that your investments aren't liquid enough for you to free up the $215 to pay the fine, but that's a different situation (and is your own damn fault). Companies can be in this situation too, but don't mistake the existence of this situation as a refutation of my argument, because it's not. My argument at its core is that a person making $100k can be expected to much more easily be able to absorb a particular fine than a person (with the same cost of living) making $50k, but you can't necessarily say this about companies, because a person's salary isn't dependent upon how much they spend, but a company's revenue is, and so if company A has a higher revenue than company B that does not mean company A's profits are higher.