as in ......I hope they keep salaries low. Business as usual.*
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/.../ns/business-us_business/After the financial crisis that felled some of Wall Street’s biggest players, politicians vowed to take a hard line against one of the most prominent symbols of excess: lavish executive pay.
But don’t expect them to do that by actually putting a cap on how much executives take home.
The Obama administration’s proposals for regulating executive pay are focusing instead on making the process of determining compensation more public, including giving shareholders a nonbinding say in pay packages.
The hope is that such measures act as a kind of peer pressure, forcing executives and their boards of directors to be more fiscally responsible and less focused on risky bets, but stopping short of making government officials into pay police.
Members of Congress, who held a hearing on the matter in mid-June, appear eager to push for legislation to regulate executive compensation more tightly, perhaps even before their late summer break.
The attention to executive pay comes after years of watching salaries among top brass swell substantially, although that has ebbed amid the financial crisis and recession. An Associated Press analysis of pay packages for chief executives of companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index found that the median pay package fell 7 percent, to $7.6 million, in 2008.
According to the AP analysis, the median cash payout of salaries and bonuses alone for CEOs was $2.4 million, a 20 percent drop from a year earlier. Still, that’s 48 times what the average worker makes, according to the AP.
While there has been an outcry over such disparity, Americans also may balk at the idea of the government setting salaries, especially if such pay caps trickled down below the executive suite.
“The idea of having a free labor market where your compensation isn’t controlled by a government authority is very much in keeping with the sort of liberal tradition in the United States,” said David Lewin, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
Administration officials also may be pushing for transparency instead of pay limits at least in part because it can be very difficult to design a law that puts a real cap on executive pay packages, without any loopholes. Politicians have learned that the hard way.
Seriously. Go work on something that actually does good rather than makes you feel good.
*Do I think CEO pay/perks got out of whack - yes. Do I think government should regulate it - no. It's futile.
