They could cut the CEO and other upper management pay... Back in the old days the owners made far less money in comparison to the hired employees than they do now. And now they act like they HAVE TO make that much... because they HAVE TO have those huge mansions that company owners didn't have 75 years ago.
They could cut CEO pay, at the risk of losing their competitive edge by being able to lure top talent.
There should be gov't-mandated, across-the-board price caps on CEO pay so ppl are hired on their merits alone and companies can't simply lure top talent. The top talent should lure the company. Tired of babying these wannabe execs. Plus the savings can be reinvested into my company instead of wasted on overgrown infants.
Because it necessitates large redistributions of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich to pay for their six-figure tax cuts and seven-figure salaries. Their salaries should be commensurate with their success. And this should be enforced by the government.
ho. lee. fuck. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/02/santorum-moves-ahead-in-michigan.html http://americanresearchgroup.com/pres2012/primary/rep/mi/
Because they're spending all their money on one person instead of creating jobs for many people. In the short term, they may get a competitive edge by hiring a great leader, but in the long term the amount of money they're not spending on job creation ensures that the economy will not improve, and, ultimately, most of those companies will fail, also, because they can't produce quality products with cut-rate, overworked employees. The CEOs usually know this of course and are just hoping the economic house of cards won't come crashing down until after they're dead/living in Aruba. See: American auto manufacturers other than Ford
I'm with Gordon Gecko on the issue of executive pay. The problem is these guys control their own paychecks, and they are not MAJORITY OWNERS OF THE DAMN COMPANY. Gates, Jobs, etc. made their fortunes through the stock prices of the shares they own, not via giving themselves huge cash paydays. By having 'independent' board of directors in public companies, the boards are able to rob the shareholders. You want to lure top talent, give them lucrative options that are only worth something if they actually do their damn job well. Too many executives are making fortunes captaining sinking ships, and that should not be possible.
That. As an shareholder I do not want my company wasting its money throwing good money on top of bad. I want it to use its funds for research and new innovations, not hiring some old white douche to look good in a suit. The gov't needs to step in if the business community doesn't. But what this has to do with GOP 2012 I have no idea and should probably go in a thread about the root causes of the recession. Which I guess is the GOP so nvm lol
It has to do with GOP 2012 because Mitt Romney is just like one of those CEOs who pays himself an exorbitant salary and doesn't actually make personal sacrifices for the sake of economic growth. Why would he act any differently as president?
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Also, why should a CEO/briefcase-carrying douchenozzle like Romney in his Bain days have to care about economic growth? He was just in it for the money no matter who he had to fuck over to get it, and though that's psychopathic asshole behavior right there, it's not his responsibility to look out for the GDP. I mean it is now, but it wasn't back then.
I have explained this so many times it hurts,but CEOs are paid a lot because their decisions affect their companies (and therefore everyone's salaries) in big ways. If you're paying a guy $10 million a year and the company has $10 billion in assets, and he makes a decision that changes the company's asset worth by 1%, he's already paid for himself ten times over. CEO pay is a huuuuge issue in the academic study of management. It's very difficult to come up with a simple solution because of short vs. long-run incentives. Stock options are commonly thought of as a good way to line up performance with pay, but it also encourages CEOs to make decisions that are based on immediate, short-run performance rather than long-term. A lot of empirical research has been done on this subject--I am not very familiar with it but familiar enough to know that the issue is far from clear-cut.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China Also I think you are wrong about GM and Chrysler. A lot of economists/analysts would say that our auto production has been so inefficient precisely because wages are too high at the bottom end!
Are you implying that China produces quality products? Because they don't. Japan does. So does the Ford Motor Company, in the past few years. What I said above is basically a paraphrase of the CEO of Ford. He knows what they economy needs and is willing to put himself second to get it.
Lol. What on earth does "quality" products mean? Apparently Chinese products are high quality enough to export billions of tons to every country on earth. Have you taken a look at Japans economy lately? It sucks. Sony is getting fucked. Their problems are immense and much harder to fix than ours.
All of that sounds good on paper but here in the real world where people live, it doesn't quite work that way. Rather, the average worker is told "work harder" which is because the company is not succeeding and the executives have sucked up all the profits. Meanwhile the worker struggles to keep his head above water, and now is being taxed more to pay for the executive community as a whole because the latter community is being lavished with tax cuts which are paid for by the average worker. Which is why I think there should be caps on CEO pay (and income) and the rest of the money should be spread evenly throughout the company, thus incentivizing ALL workers, not just those at the top, to succeed. A rising tide lifts all boats. Trickle down theories do not. But I don't really care for capitalism at all, I would rather we switch to a democratic socialist system and become less infatuated with accumulating money altogether and instead spend all our cash on important shit like universal healthcare and 35 mile-long concentration camps and the arts.
If there were caps on CEO pay then talent would flood out of the country. We live in a global economy now. If I have the chance to become CEO of a major corporation why would I even consider an American one when I can make twice as much money elsewhere? The tide would cease to rise. The nature of corporate governance insists that CEOs are paid in an efficient way. CEOs are appointed by a board of directors whose goal is to maximize shareholder value, not CEO pay. You guys act like CEOs can, in the long run, just get away with being paid a lot and sucking. That's not true at all. The CEO is the most scrutinized employee in a company. His job is always on the line. Changing this is not about putting a cap on CEO pay. It's about providing appropriate long-run incentives. Off the top of my head, I would say pay a low base salary and offer most compensation in European options with tiered expiration dates, with the greater value being further in the future.
I would also want the gov't to nip such kinds of loopholes in the bud. These kinds of loopholes hurt the average worker. I think the gov't should seize the execs' assets and repatriate them to the workers of that company, and send these kinds of unpatriotic executives to reeducation centers.
Lol. Privately-owned companies are likely to be even worse! There is no board of directors looking out for shareholders' interests. It's all about the partners maximizing their profits.
It's not necessarily about salaries; the loss of bottom-end jobs due to high CEO pay is much more damaging than the actual pay rate for those jobs. Yeah, but making disposable shit isn't a tenable business model for long-term success in a free market economy. Especially in a recession, people are going to want to buy good quality products and not just buy crap that they have to keep buying again and again. So the Chinese business model isn't a real answer to America's problems either. That seems like it's more because they're dependent on the US for their economy, not because their own business practices are so terrible. That said, I disagree with this: Government mandates like this never work, for exactly the reason wilcaz stated. Instead we (the people) just need to create enough moral and economic pressure on large corporations that they choose to do what's best for the economy because it's a moral imperative. I realize this is super-idealistic, but similar grassroots movements have changed the country significantly before (read: Civil Rights Movement).
Then why wasn't that true 75 years ago when the difference between CEO and regular employee pay was far lower than it is now, and America was pretty much leading the world?
Haha, the latter will never happen, the legislative skids are greased by the corporations; these crybabies will never allow moral and economic pressure to significantly change their ways, and indeed they do scream bloody murder/communism at the most modest of regulations. We need the gov't via the Congress, the White House or the courts to put these people in their place. Like I said earlier, there is no moral responsibility for a CEO to look out for "economic growth," but the brute force of government intervention -- by the point of a gun if necessary -- will send them a strong message that in order to do business in USA, they must follow the new rules. And yeah I gotta go do "work" too, i.e. surf the internet all day and watch my stocks make me easy money. Fuck you, Steve Jobs.
Because corporations weren't as big back then! Globalization has introduced a much more vast competitive landscape with higher profits but much more fierce competition. To continue to succeed companies have to attract top talent, and they do that with monetary incentives. As ethically unsettling as it may be for some people, failing to attract top talent puts us at risk of losing our competitive advantages, which is bad for everyone. An easy analogy would be professional sports. Why do all the best soccer players play in England and Spain? Because those teams can pay the most money to attract them. Consequently, English and Spanish teams dominate in world competition, and their organizations profit as a whole. The amount they're paying these players is insignificant compared to the potential gains they offer their organizations.
So, corporations have a dozen overpaid crybabies and have a lot of uneducated nationalists blindly cheering them on? Yeah sounds pretty accurate actually!
Let's all move past this class warfare faggotry and revel in the news that Santorum is leading in Michigan. Wooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
This is remarkably true. But all that matters is that the uneducated nationalists are paying them money.
Outside of Detroit, Ann Arbor, East Lansing, and Flint, Michigan as actually a lot like a southern state. Go to the UP and you'll hear nigger all over the place (they don't even have them up there, though, unlike the south). One of my grandfathers lives up there and he wanted David Duke for president a few elections ago when he was running. I'm not at all surprised that Santorum is doing well. Also, the article has more proof that I mentioned before about the tea party being full of shit.
You actually don't hear nigger all over the place in the South. What you're describing is a lot more extreme than anything I experienced.
True. I lived in the Detroit burbs most of my life, and ppl were pretty ignorant/conservative (same thing) outside of the areas people actually live and work and get educated. Maryland is quite the same; the more north I go, the more likely my chances of getting lynched. In the case of both it's not really a north-south thing, but a city-rural dynamic. Outside of areas where people of different races interact with each other, people get insular and retarded. Hence all the dumbfucks in flyover country (and in the inner cities, though that's more due to the fact that they're niggers).
There's that kinda shit around here, too. The further you get away from the city the more "southern" people start acting. They even have hick ass accents and hate black people.
This is pretty much my experience as well. I lived in Memphis my entire life until college and never experienced any ridiculous racism until I went to college (and subsequently transferred) in a small town in Mississippi. However, different races interacting can have a negative effect as well. I've experienced more racism in New York, probably the most multicultural city in the world, than all other places I've lived combined. The more working-class white people here in the outer boroughs are the worst. I'm sure Tech has experienced the same thing in Boston.
The massive number of people laid off by companies like Chrysler who could have been not laid off if the execs had taken bigger pay cuts? They already had jobs, they didn't need to keep their own wages high to attract top talent. Instead, they decided to let other people suffer for it by taking their jobs away from them, helping to make the unemployment rate as high as it is today. EDIT: And, don't try to sugar-coat this at all: Large numbers of people losing their jobs is the absolute worst thing that can happen to the economy. So if the CEOs are actively letting that happen, do they really care?
Why shouldn't EVERYONE take a pay cut? Oh thats right, the satan-spawn auto workers union doesn't let that happen to the "little" people. That's equality right there. However, let's say the CEO made $20 million a year and the average worker makes $40k. Let's say the CEO does take a 50% pay cut. That's only 250 jobs saved. Executive compensation cannot completely account for the massive number of layoffs. In any case, this is all theoretical because as I have explained mandating corporate affairs like CEO pay is a BAD IDEA. Most responsible companies' shareholders will deal with those matters the best they can. If they can't then they picked shitty board members and are a shitty company anyways.
To save more jobs, there should be a massive, gargantuan distribution of wealth from the rich to the middle class. When they have money to buy shit, it creates demand, which creates jobs. Showering corporations with money does not create jobs or "free them up" to hire people, despite all the rantings from Sarah Palin or Myth Romney, neither of whom would pass a basic Economics 101 class unless they took it in secret without their supporters knowing.
Showering people with money doesn't necessary boost the economy either. See the stimulus package. The basic reasoning is that people don't tend to change their consumption based on perceived one-time increases in wealth--they tend to save it. This is why tax cuts are theoretically more favorable for increasing aggregate demand. My view is that this also necessitates taxing the top tier slightly higher, though not that much higher, and keeping corporate taxes low.
The greatest portion of it but not most of it. You could also make the same case for certain tax incentives if they're not perceived as being permanent.\ also, to be clear, I agree that short-term deficit spending is a good tool to boost the economy. My problem with the stimulus package is that I think its funds were allocated poorly.
it's But yeah they were, and we could have used the opportunity to really take a torch to capitalism. An opportunity was squandered imho.
Oh I totally agree that unions are a major part of the problem too. Sure, but there are multiple people making seven or eight figures at the top in most corporations, and there are about 18,000 significantly-sized corporations in the US, which control 50% or so of the workforce. Even making a lowball estimate and saying that you can only save 100 jobs at each corporation, that's still nearly 2 million more people that would be saved from unemployment - that would cut the unemployment rate by more than 15%. Absolutely, the government can't mandate it. I'm not a socialist. I'm just saying the executives should do it because they have a moral responsibility to do it. Totally agree with this.
"One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country." - Rick Santorum Holy fuck, him winning the nomination would make my year.
