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Comment by coev | Hacker News Reader

Your salary is revenue and not profit as well, the analogy is sound.

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.

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

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.

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