At what point?Follow

Wasn't so obvious to me at all. Given that attempts have already been made to find ways to limit compensation based pretty exclusively on the assumption that there is indeed a point at which someone makes enough money, I don't see how one can defend the position you're taking here.




Did you honestly not get that it's not about what specifically is said? There is an assumption when a president expresses an opinion that this might just influence policy. If one is opposed to the idea that women and blacks should be treated differently than everyone else, then one would be alarmed by a president making the hypothetical statement I provided as an example. Via the same reasoning, if one is opposed to the idea that we should cap people's pay based on some arbitrary government mandates, then one would be alarmed by what Obama said.

The difference here isn't really about what was said, but that a statement of that nature was made in the first place.

Except, of course, that all the limits placed on compensation thus far have been based on the idea that it's the government paying the salaries of those CEOs through bailout packages, at which point we rightly have a say in their compensation. There's no reason we should pay them multimillion dollar salaries when they've been doing so poorly that we're forced to bail them out. Once they aren't in need of aid anymore, they're free to pay their CEOs whatever they like.

Except that this wasn't included in the contract when the money was loaned in the first place. Then the government tried to get this retroactively imposed, and when that failed, added it as a stipulation to new loans. First off, some of us think this is a bad idea anyway. Secondly, it's clearly an attempt to play off on the "business bad!" angle of public outrage.



If that's made a condition of the loan in the first place, sure. It's no different than a bank placing conditions on a loan at that point. My issue is with this idea that the government magically has some special powers in this area, or that manipulated public outrage over something unrelated to any aspect of the financial problem at hand is used to push for this sort of thing.



How do you decide how much of that is "borrowed" though? This gets into the entire issue of how I think the government went the wrong direction when dealing with the financial crisis in the first place. Instead of simply buying the troubled assets in question at pre-crash market values, the government (the Dems really) insisted on "loaning" money to these companies. When that decisions was made many of us conservatives opposed it precisely because once that sort of arrangement was in place, it was obvious that the Dems would then attempt to use it as leverage to control pay. Which, predictably, is exactly what happened.


The point is that the government chose that method of bailout specifically so that it could gain greater control over those companies. In fact, it spent about twice as much of our taxpayer money on said bailouts using a less efficient methodology in order to do this. I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to get outraged at how much an executive gets paid. The government should have considered that prior to deciding to bail out the company in the first place. If it didn't, then it shouldn't turn the matter over to the public and use them as tools to manipulate things.


Businesses have to be free to pay their employees as they wish. If the government wants to get in on that action, then that is the government's choice. But it shouldn't assume it knows better how to run those businesses. That's really the problem here. This becomes doubly silly when you realize that it was largely government regulations which caused the problems in the first place. It certainly was not the size of executive pay. So why insist on limiting that? All you're going to do is chase the talent out of the businesses that the government has now effectively invested the taxpayers money into. I'd much rather, if they're going to go that route in the first place, to let the companies recover and repay those loans using whatever methods they can. If we tie their hands behind their backs, we're only hurting us in the long run.

Edited, May 3rd 2010 7:32pm by gbaji