How to Evaluate Chutzpah

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By Michael Thal
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Now that's Chutzpah!

Chutzpah is a Yiddish word meaning gall or nerve. In today’s fragile economic and political times, the term takes on new heights. Here are just a few examples of amazing chutzpah.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

gall
nerve

Step 1

Citibank

1. Due to the extraordinary risks banks took over the last decade, they brought upon the worst recession since the Great Depression. The government had to bail them out so the rest of us wouldn’t have to suffer the same fate our parents and grandparents faced 80 years ago. Now these same bankers want to pay themselves a bonus. That’s chutzpah.

Fortunately, the Obama administration is saying no. The President recently said, “We believe in success, but it offends our values when executives of big financial firms—firms that are struggling—pay themselves huge bonuses, even as they continue to rely on tax payer assistance.”
Step 2

Goldman-Sachs building

Having a stable of expensive lawyers and tax consultants has paid off big for Goldman-Sachs, a full-service global investment banking and securities firm. According to Business Week, Goldman-Sachs recently reported a record $3 billion profit. The federal income tax rate for business is 35%. Here’s where the tax lawyers come in. Goldman-Sachs only paid .6 %! It’s a hell-of-a chutzpa for the middle class family because we pay 19.5%.
Step 3

Rush

Finally, we have the Republicans, God bless their conservative souls. Rush
Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed voice of the Republican Party had the Chutzpah to recently say, “Obama is a man-child president.” Our 48-year-old president is younger than the previous resident of the White House, and he’s skinny like a kid, and probably getting thinner each day considering all the problems he faces, but he’s hardly a child. Here’s a guy who practically raised himself, worked out his psychological problems of parental abandonment, and now, as columnist Maureen Dowd recently stated, “radiates a hard won maturity.”

Can we say the same about his predecessor? I think not. George W Bush ran his White House like an adolescent delegating power to his VP and other political cronies.