Here’s the thing about the mandatory Wall Street pay cuts: Changing salaries won’t stop what’s really wrong there.

What’s wrong is that they are handling our money in an unsafe way.

They’ve taken a huge slice of the economy, set our financial system at risk and basically, we can’t make them pay us for what they’ve done.

All this talk about how the brains will exit the business if pay is capped, well, would that be a bad thing?

Like maybe we could take some of those smart people and set them to tasks that might actually help rather than hurt us in the long run, hurt us like toppling our banks and crashing our retirement portfolios? (They're estimating Americans' net worth dropped in this crisis by about $15 trillion.)

I mean, would it be all that bad if Wall Street shrank?

Earlier this week, former Fed chairman and Obama economic advisor Paul Volcker spoke of "structural imbalances" that threaten the economy, still. And need to be cured before a recovery can become a true recovery.

''We have to regain our ability to produce goods," he said at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Moving money around does not necessarily provide dinner on the table. You can't run an economy where the financial sector is making 40 percent of the profits."

That's a thought.