1 of 1- Rongone
- Sentient Being
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- From: Keeping Calm, Sailing On
- Registered: 1/31/2015
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Don't worry . . . The upper 1% is still doing fine
Anyone who still believes the trickle down theories that lowering corporate taxes and granting more tax breaks to the "job creators" will stimulate the economy and benefit everyone needs to read these articles.
How paying corporate executives in excess of 250 times more than their average workers makes good economic sense, or makes for good labor/management/customer relations, is a mystery to me.
There is also a link in the Fiscal Times article naming the 25 most overpaid CEO's.
It's interesting how the highest paid boards and CEO's mesh. A lot of big Pharma, big Oil, Financial, Technical, and Media businesses. You will find it hard to convince me that these corporations, their boards, and their corporate executives provide their employees with all the benefits they deserve nor, for sure, their customers good value for the price of their products/services.
These people have been milking the system for decades by looking out for themselves and flexing their muscles through price gouging, excessive political contributions, and constant influence peddling in our state and federal legislatures purely for their own personal enrichment.
Last edited by Rongone (11/01/2016 11:28 am)
- flowergirl
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Re: Don't worry . . . The upper 1% is still doing fine
And they've always gotten away with it!
- TheLagerLad
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Re: Don't worry . . . The upper 1% is still doing fine
I guess the question is how do we deal with this?
The shareholders of these companies vote for corporate board members who vote to give the CEOs these extremely high salaries.
The companies are owned by the shareholders and as such have the ability to change the structure of compensation through voting out existing board members.
But they don't. Probably because in most cases they are getting a dividend or some other return on their investment. Those dividends might go directly into 401k accounts, or pensions, or perhaps into the IRA of a typical middle class investor
The other way to get at both businesses and their enriched CEOs is through taxation. If a person negotiates him or herself a salary of $50 million dollars a year, how much should a government allow them to keep?
Whenever one of those conversations come up where someone complains about teacher salaries being too high, I always ask, "Well, what do you think a teacher should make? And while you're thinking about that, can you please determine the appropriate salary of every other job that a person can hold in the United States."
My point is that it's takes a lot of stones to personally determine what someone's salary should be. Because everyone is going to have a personal view of what is "valuable" to them and what it not.
Personally, I think the average salary of an Information Technology Consultant should be in the $75 to $100 million dollar per year range. 
Is it good for a society to have a concentration of wealth at the very top? No.
Does a free and open society living in a democracy have the ability to change that over time? Yes.
I think you're going to see a lot of different United States of America over the next three, four, or eight years. - President Donald J. Trump
- Rongone
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- From: Keeping Calm, Sailing On
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Re: Don't worry . . . The upper 1% is still doing fine
There is a huuuuuge caveat to the statement "The shareholders of these companies vote for the corporate board members who vote to give the CEOs these extremely high salaries." And "The companies are owned by the shareholders and as such have the ability to change the structure of compensation through voting out existing board members."
That caveat is, as a shareholder of a couple of publically held companies, voting my shares have little or no impact on salary structure or board membership. The reason is the number of shares held by the average investor don't amount to anything of influence in these elections. The vast majority of shares in the public company are owned by the company itself, mutual fund companies, other financial institutions, and the very corporate executives that, in collusion with the board members with which they have an incestuous relationship (you put me on your board & I'll put you on mine), select the slate of candidates up for election to the board of directors. With these groups holding hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of shares as opposed to the average investor who has a couple hundred or thousand shares, the outcome of any election to the board is a preconceived outcome. With the same recycled group of executives managing the companies and acting as directors on the boards of each other's companies, it's easy to see how these outrageous compensation packages continue to proliferate in corporate America.
It's not the number of investors that determine the board or the compensation packages, it's a small number of investors that hold staggering amounts of shares that make the decisions.
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