As far as letting the "too big to fail" companies fail......damned straight we do! It makes no sense whatsoever to keep on propping up a company that is so horribly under water that they can't recover. Let 'em go BK and have the pieces and parts snatched up by outfits that can do something with them.
Agree 100%. We now see what are money gets us, in terms of corporate bailouts, lol.
As far as the stock options you mention, LOTS of people at GM and other large, publicly held corporations receive options. Many of those people are EXACTLY the ones you describe who are the regular line employees...the engineers who get a base salary of $150k and the Assistant HR director for division 3 who makes $90k. The idea has ALWAYS been to get employees to have a little skin in the game.
Right, and what the government is trying to do, is roll that same idea up the ways a bit, to the higher end executives. But it seems to me, they object to this, and the only reason I can think of is, because they don't WANT stocks, they want CASH. Because CASH is a LOT less affected by the performance of their company.
I'm not so sure why you have this hangup with highly compensated employees. The few people that manage to get into senior management positions are every bit as important to the company as the line employees....more so in most cases.
Which is why it behooves us, and by us, I mean the loan holders, to see to it that THEY, too, have a decent amount of skin in the game, in the form of...GASP...maybe taking some pay cuts if the company THEY run does not fair well, and, GASP, not getting millions in CASH bonuses, instead, in long term stock options...you know, to make it so those people REALLY put their A plus effort into the deal...and if their A plus effort is less than what is needed, less loss on the companies, and therefor, the tax payer bailout funds.
There is a gigantic step between providing the services with which you are tasked and being the one who decides what those tasks need to be. There is also a corresponding step up in responsibility and ultimately in the liability that you present to the corporation and THAT is why these people are more highly compensated.
Except these people HAVE NO LIABILITY. Tell me, when GM was drowning, prior to the bail out, what were the top brass doing? Sweating bullets, or getting PAID? And I mean PAID. And what happened afterwords? Did they lose everything? What would happen, should GM go down in a roaring ball of fire? They lose their jobs, right along with the factory workers...but who gets hit the hardest, the guy with a 500 million dollar nest egg thanks to 500K a year and up salary for years on end, plus huge bonuses that, apparently, are in no way performance based, resulting in said roaring ball of flame...or the line worker? Can the line worker simply pick up and move on to the next job? Can the executive? I'm not arguing with WHY these people make a lot more money than the union idiot plugging tab A into slot B, I'm aware of it.
What I'm asking is...why, exactly, would someone object to a mandate that imposes merit based financial rewards, and pay restrictions (past 500K a year), for a company that is floundering?
