Thrifty Bank of America is worse than bonus-mad Wall Street.

First came the shock over how badly our financial system messed up. Now comes the outrage over how well it got paid for doing so. We've always known that Wall Street bankers got paid too much. Now we know a lot more about how much. Thanks to New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, we have a count of the million-plus earners at the big banks: 953 at Goldman Sachs (GS) last year, more than 1,600 at JPMorgan Chase, and 738 at Citigroup (C), the country's biggest recipient of government disability aid.

Bonus rage is a natural reaction to hearing just how out of sync with ordinary life Wall Street salaries are. It's freighted, understandably, with huge political symbolism. Unfortunately, it's also a major distraction from a lot of the real problems of the banking system. The rhetoric of bonus rage says that we can fix the financial system by cutting mega-paychecks and going back to basic principles of moderation. That sounds great. But look more closely and some of the very companies that are now being lauded for their relative frugality, such as Bank of America (BAC), are among the worst actors on the financial stage—costly to the government, dangerous to financial stability, and poisonous to consumers.

A spate of stories, such as this in the New York Times Dealbook blog or this one on the finance site Breaking Views, have talked about how hard it will be to integrate Merrill Lynch's well-paid "Thundering Herd" of brokers into Bank of America's "culture of thrift." At first glance the numbers in the Cuomo report seem to back this notion of Charlotte, N.C.*-based Bank of America as a thrifty institution, a stark contrast to its profligate New York cousins. JPMorgan Chase paid out $1 million or more to 1,626 of its employees in 2008. Bank of America has slightly more workers in total but kept the number of million-dollar earners down to 172. Surely this "culture of thrift" and relatively moderate compensation must be a good thing, right?

Well, for Bank of America's customers, no. BofA has long been the pacesetter in consumer-bashing bank practices. Take any metric you like. The first bank to raise ATM charges to $3? Check. Minimum payments structured so that credit card borrowers unwittingly exceed their limits and get hit with interest rate boosts to 30 percent? Check. Arbitrary credit card rate increases to sky-high rates? Check. (Though when I "opted out" of the preposterous rate increase on my own Bank of America credit card, at least their customer service rep had the good grace to good-naturedly say that I was doing the right thing. Give 'em citizenship points for that.) The pièce de résistance is loan modification. While JPMorgan Chase has begun making modifications for 20 percent of its mortgages and Citi for 15 percent, Bank of America has moved to adjust only a meager 4 percent of its loans.