The AIG (Ain’t I Greedy) debacle reinforces my belief that the most onerous jobs should be rewarded with the highest salaries.

For instance, coal miners, trash collectors, garbage scowl crews, schoolteachers, firefighters and cops should be paid in six figures.

People who never get their hands dirty – except in a symbolic sense– CEOs, bank presidents, brokers, hedge fund operators and other forms of money manipulators should be paid by the hour, perhaps $12.50 tops with time and a half for overtime (I’m not vindictive).

And when crimes are committed by these so-called white-collar miscreants, they not only should be forced to acquire blisters on their pinkies by converting big rocks into little rocks but, beforehand, be taken out and flogged on the public square.

How else are we going to restore family values and morality if we reserve harsh punishments only for slobs who hold up filling stations for twenty bucks or crack dealers who sell dime packages and don’t sock it to the real hardened criminals who hide in boardrooms behind flow charts?

Forget those piddling bonuses handed out to hundreds of Wall Street traders standing in line with their hands out like baby robins waiting for feeding time. Peanuts!

Consider instead the real money boys such as Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein who took home $68.5 million in cash and equity in 2007. In fact, his total take from 2003 to 2007 was $210,169,732.

Or, before Edward Liddy took over as CEO of American Insurance Group at a salary of $1 a year to try to improve the company’s fortunes, AIG had to let his predecessor, Martin Sullivan, go last June after three quarters of losses totaling $18 billion.

Poor Mr. Sullivan was forced to leave with a package that included a $4 million pro-rated bonus, $15 million in severance, and other benefits then valued at $28 million, for a total of $47 million.

A portfolio of $441 billon in credit default swaps (in the words of Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-NY, “I can’t believe it’s not real insurance,” a play on the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Real Butter) gutted the way for AIG’s meltdown.

Michael Shnayerson, in the March issue of Vanity Fair, says that Joseph Cassano, the AIG executive whose Financial Products division was responsible for all those CDS’s, “left in February with a $1 million-a-month consulting contract (since discontinued) and $69 million in deferred compensation. He is reported to have since repaired to his three-story town house in London’s Knightsbridge district, on a bucolic square with a private garden, and his lawyer declined to respond to an e-mail from Vanity Fair.”

Charles Geisst, finance professor at Manhattan College, shoots down the argument of Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally that no TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) money went into the bonuses.

“If they didn’t have the TARP money, they would be forced to raise fresh capital,” says Geisst.

Craef Crystal, a former compensation consultant, puts it more succinctly on Bloomberg.com: “The argument of saying we’re not using the bailout money is just crap because money’s fungible. Money’s money. It exposes them to ridicule.”

Morgan Stanley’s John Mack oversaw $15.2 billion in write-downs on toxic securities through the third quarter of 2008. As the firm dipped toward bankruptcy, its shares dropped 70 percent. While taking $10 billion in TARP money, it too began paying out bonuses – albeit cut by half to $5 billion, or more than the company’s modest profit of $1.59 billion for the year.

Mack, says the VF article, did OK since his return to the firm in 2005, being rewarded a total of $69,565,233, “more than enough for greens fees at the Apawamis golf course, in Rye, New York, where his home, resembling a French chateau, looks out on the 18th hole. Foregoing his 2008 bonus would hurt, but perhaps not that much.”

Take the argument that unless such staggering sums need to be paid partners to keep them from being poached by rival firms. Well, says Shnayerson, 200,000 jobs have been lost in the financial sector.

So who’s going to hire all those bums?