Cap on CEO Salaries

[TulipsAndSunscreen]

I feel like banking, like medicine, is something that is visible to the average person and therefore a target. Many heads of billion dollar companies are equally highly paid, it's just the public doesn't know it/see it as openly.


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[houseelf]

Honestly, I'm not sure capping the CEO salary really IS the answer. Quite simply, it is just THE LEVEL of Corporate welfare is ridiculous in light of the fact that the corporations do not justify such welfare with actions like plowing profits back into the middle class wages, training for employees, building domestic plants, research and development, or other long term benefits for the economy. Typically, profits pay a few exorbitant salaries and a couple of dividends when possible.

If anything, public interest items like those I enumerated above have been decimated even though corporate welfare has increased substantially in the past decade. My response to the most rabid tea party pundit would be that absolutely there should be little transfer of wealth from rich to poor or from the poor to rich. Like everything in this country, this debate is always framed in absolutes when really things need simply scaled back a bit. Where the hell is the moderate middle? Please stand up.

Honestly, things need reigned in because Wall Street is doing a HORRIBLE job of self policing. Our entire system is only marginally safer than it was pre 2008, but I digress from the topic at hand.

It's kind of like every divorce decree I ever wrote. Life would be so much easier if we could just legislate that people should not be assholes. Really, guys, don't be assholes to your employees while you make exorbitant amounts. Such a simple concept. I agree with Princess Fiona who opined that if these corporations paid a living wage or offered training or benefits, the sky is the limit for CEO compensation. Go make millions and spread your good fortune all the way around as you see fit.

[Sheherezade]

Life would be so much easier if we could just legislate that people should not be assholes.

Hear, hear. There's a great quote from Wealth of Nations in which Adam Smith qualifies the free market by saying that morality must be present. I think that gets overlooked so often. You can't just do what serves you best and it all works out. You have to be a moral person doing what serves their business best....within reason. We've just lost the whole collective idea of what's "within reason".

I think these conversations about the economy are all so hard because everything is interconnected. Highly interconnected. I always think about the health care system and that everyone says how much cost we could cut out if we went single payer -- and disregarding all the other issues the idea of single payer triggers, I always think "Yeah, we cut costs. Because we cut out a whole bunch of jobs. Masses of them." You have to think what reaction that will trigger next and where that takes you.

I don't think legislating pay would help. I don't know if we could have avoided bailouts without causing huge ripples that hurt "the little guy" just as much as our current situation does. I don't know if raising the capital gains tax would make the pay situation more equal. Basically, the theme here is I don't know.

I do wish we had a bit more morality in our leadership. And I wish people would stop measuring worth in dollars. It's made for a bad society.