Thanks to soap operas, we have the collective gasp. It goes up when the child we assumed all along was someone’s turns out to be someone else’s, except that the first someone has secret information on how it is actually someone else entirely: the last person you would expect.

And so it went with pay packages at the Magnificent Seven the other day. We had all gotten so used to deploring the giant bonuses still flowing to the chiefs of these bailed-out behemoths and seeing nothing change. So when Kenneth Feinberg finally lowered the boom, Americans gasped across four time zones, nine if you include Puerto Rico and Guam.

Kenneth Feinberg is better known as the pay czar. He has been hired by the Treasury Department to see that taxpayers are only semi-exploited by the seven big companies they have rescued. They are Bank of America Corp., Citigroup, GMAC, General Motors, Chrysler, Chrysler Financial and American International Group (AIG).

Feinberg’s authority goes no further, and he says he does not want it to. Overpriced executives at other companies are somebody else’s problem. Still, he hopes that maybe what he has done will set an example.

For top executives at each of the seven companies, average total compensation has been ordered cut in half. Base salaries, cut by an average of 90 percent, may not exceed $500,000. Perks generally may not surpass $25,000. Pay packages will consist partly of stock that must be held for at least two years. After that, only a third of the stocks may be sold for each of the following three years. This means that the executives will have a greater stake in how well their companies actually do.

Not many people would see these terms as tragic. Yet experts on compensation (an actual job) have uncorked their own clubby little gasp, averring that Feinberg’s deal is brutal indeed.

If so, Fritz Henderson, the head of GM, is bravely paying them no mind. He has pronounced the cuts in his case fair. And why wouldn’t he? He will still get a cash salary of $950,000. A lot of folks could scrape by on that, and still have a few bucks left over for bingo night.

On the snooty side of the street are finance types who say big bonuses are not what taxpayers should care about. What matters are the bigger problems in our financial system: banks and other entities that are too big, or too interconnected, to fail.

But Americans do not need a degree in finance to see that the bonuses are not the problem. They are just offended, in the case of bailed-out firms, to have to pay them.

Defenders of big executive bucks warn that without a little extra, the talent will walk off the set. In fact, a dozen or so already have, leaving AIG and Bank of America for private equity companies or hedge firms or wherever it is that traders with an alleged magic touch go. That means that taxpayers, who now have a big stake in the Magnificent Seven’s doing well, may have to hire some second stringers.

I’d say we can take our chances. The original talent made so many bad bets, and did so much to nearly destroy their employers, that the second string can hardly do worse. Maybe we should even let some real backbenchers in. Hordes of recent college graduates are looking for work, and would gladly settle for just enough to cover a studio apartment.

What is starting to get to everyone is the sense of entitlement at the top.

For decades, the fortunes of middle-class households have improved only modestly. But compensation for the wealthiest Americans has soared. Since the 1990s, the finance class in particular has absorbed a higher share of overall profits.

Yet it has done little to help the rest of the economy. The recession has only made the gap more painfully obvious: millions of Americans are out of work and struggling; Goldman Sachs posted $3.19 billion in first-quarter profits, and the bonuses are going to be huge.

In the long run, arbitrary government meddling with salaries is not the answer. But better rules governing the handling of risk, including the baffling financial instruments known as derivatives, are crucial, both to preventing a repeat of the current crisis and restoring a sense of fair play. Already, lobbyists are trying to weaken proposed reforms. It would be nice if, for once, they were left gasping over how things turned out.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.