RE: Then ask yourself this - why haven’t you taken your money out of those corporations (since you’re obviously dissatisfied with the pay their CEOs receive)?
I can’t because most of my investments are in 401(K). Most of these are tied to index funds that INVEST in these companies. My company only has a limited number of choices.
For the past 10 years the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Index have put on very poor returns.
QUESTIONING the performance of a company’s CEO is not (repeat NOT ) an attempt at demanding government action.
(a) I’m perfectly happy to concede the government interference issue (for the time being);
(b) If you don’t like the options available to you in your 401(k), (i) lobby your employer’s HR deparment to add other options, (ii) stop contributing and put your money elsewhere (and make contributions to an IRA instead), or (iii) find a new employer.
Again, with all due respect, the answer is still self-evident.
This entire article is a class warfare screed disguised as statement of concern. I disagree with the entire premise.
This is part of a “death by a thousand cuts” of American industry, ONE more regulation in a bundle of regulations that must be thousands and thousands of pages long.
If I start my own company, and I pay myself 1000 times as much as someone I hire at minimum wage, whose business is that, and why should I submit (via a legal requirement) that ratio?
What career government/party bureaucrat or union organizer put the bug in someone’s ear that the metric of the ratio of highest-to-lowest pay is something that will determine...what? The “fairness” of a CEO’s salary? What does THAT have to do with anything?
You may like or dislike Steve Jobs of Apple, but doing a calculation of his compensation package relative to that of a minimum wage person whose job may involve emptying the trash says nothing, absolutely nothing about the performance of that company, which is stellar.
If a person owns a company and is the CEO, THAT person should be able to decide compensation. If compensation is determined by a board of trustees, board of governors, board of managers, or executive board, then they should do what they are tasked with doing. I don’t agree with putting this in the hands of every single shareholder in a publicly traded company. That isn’t going to “fix” it if it isn’t working, all it is going to do is make the process so unwieldy as to be unworkable.
This ratio concept is a LIBERAL creation, this metric of pay ratios. Liberals always like to be the smartest ones in the room, and they expect everyone to accept their logic on these matters. However, as Thomas Sowell so accurately points out, they are a party of “one-stage-thinking”. If they come across something like the ratio of pay between highest and lowest paid employees, and it fits their template, then it becomes law.
LIBERALS SHOULD HAVE THIS TATTOOED ON THEIR FOREHEADS AND INSIDE OF THEIR EYELIDS: CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
Letting liberal premises go unchallenged (such as the ‘fact’ that abortion is allowed due to a penumbra in the Constitution) then they build a huge and horrible edifice on the foundation of that one concession. In this case, agreeing that this bogus ratio should be something that law should be based on is another piece of liberal tripe that should automatically disqualify anyone from serious consideration as a conservative thinker.
Marx would be just fine with this concept, as are nearly all leftists, but that does not make it right.