An End to Extortion Pay

Wait as second... I mean exorbitant pay.

No, no... make that "executive" pay. You know, as in we took the economy out back and "executed" it.

Here's an article that examines CEO pay and the author argues that even though US CEOs get outrageous pay compared to CEOs around the world -- and produce weak company performance and delivered a faltering US economy -- that letting them have astronomical pay is well, OK because they "deserve" those big bucks. This is an opinion piece by Robert H. Frank in the NY Times:

It’s no wonder that voters’ outrage over exorbitant executive pay is mounting. After all, the government just had to bail out financial firms that paid big bonuses last year to many of the same executives who helped precipitate the current financial crisis.

Nor is it any wonder that Congress is considering measures to limit executive pay — not just in the financial industry, but economywide. So far, the only formal legislative proposal is “say on pay,” which would require a nonbinding shareholder vote on executive pay proposals. But critics complain that this would have little impact and are hungry for stronger measures.

One popular proposal would cap the chief executive’s pay at each company at 20 times its average worker’s salary. But while Congress may well have compelling reasons to limit executive pay in companies seeking bailout money, voter anger is not a good reason to extend pay caps more generally.

To be sure, executive pay in the United States is vastly higher than necessary. Executives in other countries, whose pay is often less than one-fifth that of their American counterparts, seem to work just as hard and perform just as well. The same was true of American executives in the 1980s.

I find this funny because the US experiment with giving ridiculously high pay to their CEOs has destroyed their economy... and brought the rest of the world down as well. Despite this, the author argues that (except for the financial industry) these obscene pay packets are "justified".

Hmm... I guess to really hit the ball out of the park in terms of a pay packet you literally have to crater the entire world's economy. Then you will truly "deserve" the outrageously over-the-top pay. It seems that the Americans measure success not by products produced or services rendered, but by the size of the economic catastrophe, the size of shareholder holdings shredded, the total number of jobs destroyed, or the number of communities left derelict when the jobs are taken away. In this race, the Americans are leading the world, and their CEO pay reflects their ability to excel well past what the poorly paid CEOs in other countries can muster. Hurrah!