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Why do American CEOs get paid so much?

iguanaman said:
Bill Gates asked for his taxes to be raised along with the rest of the billionaires. We can't fix greed when the Govt. is cheering the greedy on.
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right!! Gates and Buffet dodge every tax they can and put 99% in a foundation where liberal govt cant waste it, and where they can put it to good use!! What planet have you been on!! OMG!!
 
rickc said:
organized labor is the only chance the working class has to negotiate with capital

but

i think it is the tax.code that has allowed the 1% their meteoric rise in wealth.

before reagan once they hit the top marginal tax rate they weren't keeping much of it anyway so it was much easier to invest in the company and in better salaries for.workers. After Reagan they saw an opportunity to keep it all and they did.
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You understand (just kidding) that most of the wealth of America's richest people has never been taxed at any rate. Nothing to do with Reagan or any politician.

Their wealth is in the value of stocks of companies they created. For example Warren Buffett who has a lot to say about taxes has never paid tax on most of his wealth. As a matter of fact most his wealth will never be taxed as even when he passes as the money will go the Gates' charity.
 
James972 said:
totally 100% liberals and nuts. if we still had unions today 100% of our jobs would be in China. Not even kindergarten thinking but typical of a liberal I'm so sad to say!!
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An ideologue with no idea is a conundrum indeed.
 
rickc said:
organized labor is the only chance the working class has to negotiate with capital
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Organized labor had their chance. Didn't work in the face of global competition. Only success is creating a situation where the politicians they negotiate with are also the ones that receive almost 100% of their political contributions.

rickc said:
but

i think it is the tax.code that has allowed the 1% their meteoric rise in wealth.

before reagan once they hit the top marginal tax rate they weren't keeping much of it anyway so it was much easier to invest in the company and in better salaries for.workers. After Reagan they saw an opportunity to keep it all and they did.
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That's silly. After Reagan they became the prime contributors to total tax revenue. Before Reagan high earners found how to organize they finances to minimize taxation.
 
Bullseye said:
Organized labor had their chance. Didn't work in the face of global competition. Only success is creating a situation where the politicians they negotiate with are also the ones that receive almost 100% of their political contributions.

That's silly. After Reagan they became the prime contributors to total tax revenue. Before Reagan high earners found how to organize they finances to minimize taxation.
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Yes they did. No one likes to pay the Govt. That's the point of high tax rates. Instead of taking exorbitant salaries that would be subject to high tax rates they did things like invest in the future of their business and gave raises to their employees.. It's all in the data....Notice how wage increases moved in tandem until the 1980's. Reaganomics and his Yuppies put a stop to that nonsense. Business investment has cratered too. Why worry about the future of your business when you can future-proof your bank account in a few years of multi-million$ salaries?

Chart-1-US-fixed-investment-as-percentage-of-GDP.jpg


5-15-18pov-f1.png
 
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iguanaman said:
Yes they did. No one likes to pay the Govt. That's the point of high tax rates. Instead of taking exorbitant salaries that would be subject to high tax rates they did things like invest in the future of their business and gave raises to their employees.. It's all in the data....Notice how wages increases moved in tandem until the 1980's and Reaganomics.

Chart-1-US-fixed-investment-as-percentage-of-GDP.jpg


5-15-18pov-f1.png
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Neither of these charts addresses the point I made and each is outdated.
 
Bullseye said:
Neither of these charts addresses the point I made and each is outdated.
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How can historical facts become outdated? And the trends have only continued to get worse as you trace them to 2018.

History, and long hard experience, not just in this country but all over the world, just don’t support your position very well- unless, of course, you say you have a way of doing it differently this time. I would be interested in hearing about it if you do. But all I have heard so far is just proposals for repeating the exact same mistakes of the past, over and over again, and completely turning a blind eye to what has worked well in the past, apparently hoping to get a different result this time. That, as Einstein pointed out, is the definition of insanity.
 
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iguanaman said:
Yes they did. No one likes to pay the Govt. That's the point of high tax rates. Instead of taking exorbitant salaries that would be subject to high tax rates they did things like invest in the future of their business and gave raises to their employees.. It's all in the data....Notice how wage increases moved in tandem until the 1980's. Reaganomics and his Yuppies put a stop to that nonsense. Business investment has cratered too. Why worry about the future of your business when you can future-proof your bank account in a few years of multi-million$ salaries?

Chart-1-US-fixed-investment-as-percentage-of-GDP.jpg


5-15-18pov-f1.png
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+1

this guy sees the picture

those 1%ers will fight tooth and.nail to maintain the status quo. they have spent decades and.100's of millions of dollars to rig the game in their favor.
 
ataraxia said:
How can historical facts become outdated? And the trends have only continued to get worse as you trace them to 2018.

History, and long hard experience, not just in this country but all over the world, just don’t support your position very well- unless, of course, you say you have a way of doing it differently this time. I would be interested in hearing about it if you do. But all I have heard so far is just proposals for repeating the exact same mistakes of the past, over and over again, and completely turning a blind eye to what has worked well in the past, apparently hoping to get a different result this time. That, as Einstein pointed out, is the definition of insanity.
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First off, I have to ask WHY you feel things need to be changed. what I see is a system that rewards hard work, intelligent risk taking, and working to gather knowledge and skilling to make oneself more valuable to employers. Instead of whining and crying that someone is making more money than you you should study what he's done to achieve that. CEO's that are making 312 times what the average employee does while guiding the company that employees tens of thousands of employees is a bargain.

Despite all you guys handwringing and wailing the bottom line is there is a strong correlation between what an employee contributes to company's bottom line and what he gets paid. Factor in how easy he is to replace and you get an appropriate salary. Look around - the world is getting more technical and complex with literally new technologies appearing day to day. And there aren't enough people around to create and manage it - that's why those that can get the big bucks.
 
American CEOs get paid so much because the corporate entities have determined that it is in their businesses best interest to have highly paid people in strategic positions that enhance the money making capacity of their business for all involved and the company's stock holders.

The better question is "why the **** do you care?" or "why are you so ****ing obsessed with the success of others and so nonchalant about your own?"

I look at it this way. Bill Gates made Microsoft. You can attribute many of his successes to the board, to development, to the workers, but at the end of the day...Bill Gates created the giant that is Microsoft. Over the course of time (since 1975), Bill Gates is responsible for 3 billionaires and 12,000 millionaires of Microsoft employees alone, to say nothing of the stockholders. Last year alone Microsoft employed 131,000 people. Over its history? Many millions. They have led the way in software and gaming technologies. Microsoft as a corporation has given away huge monies to charitable entities to say nothing of the donations of their staff and founders.

So is he worth it? Hell yes. And to the corporate entities and stockholders, so are their CEOs.
 
rickc said:
If the Fortune 500 are allowed to merge, antitrust critics argue, the United States will once again be armed for international combat.
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Pure Bullshat.

The antitrust laws are there for a reason. One we seem to have forgot as a nation of consumers who are being screwed every time we buy something/anything.

Market consolidation is the chief reason that Americans are paying higher than necessary prices for goods/services. Because competition has been subdued by America's mad corporate buy-out rush that effectively reduces competition. For which we passed anti-trust laws at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Those laws are significantly outdated but they are nonetheless effectively "on the books".

We live in a country that is highly oligopolistic. Which means this: An economic state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers.

And it is due to the fact that we have allowed Anti-trust Laws to linger into non-observance, largely out of corporate greed to carve-out large market shares - but always leave a small coterie supposed "competitors".

From Bloomberg, here: Big Companies Are Getting a Chokehold on the Economy

excerpt:
In a recent paper, economists Söhnke Bartram, Gregory Brown and René M. Stulz show that the increasing domination of public markets by large old companies -- the superstars that economists are warning about -- is responsible for the increasing correlations between stocks.
Stulz also has another new paper, along with Craig Doidge, Kathleen Kahle and G. Andrew Karolyi, illustrating just how much the U.S. public markets are devoid of small, fast-growing companies. The days when a new company such as Amazon.com Inc. -- which went public in 1997 at a market value of just $438 million -- would rush to list itself on the exchanges are long gone. Uber Technologies Inc., for example, is still private, but is valued at about $50 billion. It’s not just tech startups, though -- smaller companies in general are moving off of the exchanges. This is one big reason why the public markets are shrinking:

In past eras, the government acted to stop companies from getting too big. It could do the same now by strengthening antitrust enforcement, preventing big mergers and reviewing them after the fact. Some politicians, such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have declared their desire to open up a new era of trust-busting. And to his credit, President Donald Trump did block AT&T’s attempted takeover of Time Warner, though his decision may have been driven by personal bias.
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Warren is spot on. Having made stupendous riches for a select few, it is already too late to "do something". But better late than never! This colossal rip-off of American consumers must stop!

Quite simply, we need to elect a PotUS with the courage to take-on BigBusiness, which has gone beyond the pale. We need for some very large companies in oligopoly-markets to be downsized. Amazon is only one of them, and needs badly a competent competition.

And we, the sheeple, shall continue to pay outrageous prices for goods/service for as long as we do not take into consideration the blatant need for a strong and aggressive Anti-trust force in the US Attorney General's organization ...

 
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Bullseye said:
Neither of these charts addresses the point I made and each is outdated.
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You really think that this problem has been fixed in the span of about 5 years?

MaleMedianIncome.png


And remember that this doesn't take into account unemployment, which makes the situation worse.
 
phattonez said:
You really think that this problem has been fixed in the span of about 5 years?

MaleMedianIncome.png


And remember that this doesn't take into account unemployment, which makes the situation worse.
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Second chart omits half of the population. Other than that I see no problems. Productivity has improved just a tad from 1947. No need to fix something that isn't broken.
 
Lafayette said:


And we, the sheeple, shall continue to pay outrageous prices for goods/service for as long as we do not take into consideration the blatant need for a strong and aggressive Anti-trust force in the US Attorney General's organization ...
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Thanks to Republicans trade is international. If you think American corporate prices are high you are free to start a business, undercut prices and get filthy rich helping the American people or you can simply shop in China through Aliexpress and cut the price you pay in half!! Anti trust is obsolete thanks to Republican capitalism.
 
phattonez said:
And remember that this doesn't take into account unemployment, which makes the situation worse.
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Oups, you forgot the last 10 years (on your chart).

Here is what it should look like:
20171102232245%21US_GDP_per_capita_vs_median_household_income.png


Note that median household income has been on the rise. But that rise starts at about the time in Obama's administration that saw the long-awaited rebound in the economy in 2014 (when we see an uptick in the median household income).

And whyzat? It was inevitable that it would take so long. Economic history since the outset of the Great Recession:
*Obama stopped the Great Recession explosion of unemployment-rates in 2008, his first year in office. The Great Recession (2008/10) was Dubya's gift to Obama's presidency.
*Obama's bill (ARRA, passed with a Dem HofR in early 2008) spent $875M to restart the economy. It's effort was to stop-dead the exploding unemployment rate, which had been at 10%! (See here.)
*But when Americans foolishly gave the HofR over to the Replicants (2010), Obama wanted more stimulus spending; which he was refused by the Replicants. Do you remember the Replicant hogwash at the time about "the infernal spiral of the America's humongous debt"? [That was their "excuse" for saying no to more spending in an economy still suffering from 6.5% unemployment!!!
*But why the "excuse"? Because the Replicants WANTED high unemployment to help win the PotUS election in 2012!
*Whereupon there was no further stimulus-spending beyond 2010, and the economy was left to recover all by itself. See the employment-to-population ratio chart here, and note that the ratio effectively finally goes-north around 2014.

And, finally:
*The consequence was that, after such a long recession, the next Replicant candidate had a good chance at the presidency despite the fact that the Replicants themselves had refused any spending that would have shortened the low-employment timeline!
*Which is how Donald Dork lost the popular-vote election, but won the presidency. (Also yet another bizarre tale in a long list of America's recent political and economic history!)
 
Bullseye said:
Second chart omits half of the population. Other than that I see no problems.
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Why wouldn't everyone's wages be keeping up?

Productivity has improved just a tad from 1947. No need to fix something that isn't broken.
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What are you talking about?

what-can-labor-productivity-tell-us-chart1.png
 
James972 said:
Thanks to Republicans trade is international. If you think American corporate prices are high you are free to start a business, undercut prices and get filthy rich helping the American people or you can simply shop in China through Aliexpress and cut the price you pay in half!! Anti trust is obsolete thanks to Republican capitalism.
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Driving production overseas in order to avoid employing Americans doesn't help Americans. Trying to drive up demand while diminishing our production is an unsustainable model, and it shows. This is why Americans are actually poorer today than they were decades ago.
 
Lafayette said:
And, finally:
*The consequence was that, after such a long recession, the next Replicant candidate had a good chance at the presidency despite the fact that the Replicants themselves had refused any spending that would have shortened the low-employment timeline!
*Which is how Donald Dork lost the popular-vote election, but won the presidency. (Also yet another bizarre tale in a long list of America's recent political and economic history!)
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I'm actually pretty supportive of your narrative overall. Unemployment is stupid, and the fact that we paid millions of people for years to do no labor is foolish. I'd much rather have had a big infrastructure program to address unemployment, and pay people to do useful work for us. We also should have let the big banks fail rather than bailing them out. Imagine, we could have spent more than a trillion dollars (add up what we spent on the bailouts, unemployment payments, food stamps, etc.) and gotten desperately needed infrastructure. What did we do instead? People were (and still are!) unemployed for years collecting money, and we gave billions of dollars to institutions that are really nothing more than gamblers.

We could have increased water capacity, built trains, and built more roads. What did we get instead? Bankers got fat bonuses, bond holders were saved, and people were paid to do nothing. This economy is a joke.
 
the tax code

if the top marginal tax rate started at $500,000 and was 60% above that you would see change.

if the long term capital gains holding period was 5 years instead of 1 year you would.see change. and if the the long term capital gains rate was raised to 25% you would see change.

before reagan once they hit the top marginal tax rate they weren't keeping much of it anyway so it was much easier to invest in the company and in better salaries for.workers. After Reagan they saw an opportunity to keep it all and they did.
 
the tax code

if the top marginal tax rate started at $500,000 and was 60% above that you would see change.

if the long term capital gains holding period was 5 years instead of 1 year you would.see change. and if the the long term capital gains rate was raised to 25% you would see change.
 
phattonez said:
I'd much rather have had a big infrastructure program to address unemployment,
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total ignorance of course. to employ 100 in make work infrastructure you'd have to raise tax enough to unemploy 100 workers doing real work so no net benefit would be possible, rather you'd have net less from trading real jobs for make work jobs. Do you understand? Econ 101?
 
phattonez said:
Driving production overseas in order to avoid employing Americans doesn't help Americans.
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?? If I said it did I"ll pay you $10,000. Does the liberal want to bet?
 
phattonez said:
This is why Americans are actually poorer today than they were decades ago.
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we are poorer because idiotic liberal policies made illegals and Chinese richer. Do you understand?
 
phattonez said:
Driving production overseas in order to avoid employing Americans doesn't help Americans. Trying to drive up demand while diminishing our production is an unsustainable model, and it shows. This is why Americans are actually poorer today than they were decades ago.
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I assume you have changed subject from anti trust because you lost debate yet again? Do you really want to be a liberal all your life? Do you want to meet your maker as a liberal?
 
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