Probably not. It just seems to me that formerly great cos like Ml suddenly get komansky, Steffens, Gorman oneil, Thain, lewis et al within a few years of each other, and each brings in a team and each team parachutes out with them, and then ten years later 90% of a great company has gone. I could give several other such examples.
OK. This isn’t GD, so I won’t press the issue.
I’m not sure the incentives of this scheme are going to work quite the way you think. Sure, you’re paying the regulators a large salary to attract talented people, but where’s the incentive to do the job well? It might even be the reverse. Their salaries are tied to those of the executives of the companies they investigate. If they find one of those companies in violation, and prosecute, the scandal could cause the company to fire its CEO. If that happens to enough companies, the myth of the megabucks-worthy CEO starts to unravel. As executive salaries decline, so do those of the regulators. By working effectively, the regulators are in danger of driving their own salaries downwards.
If the current climate of CEOs making $100 million is a problem, then having a group of people in the government also making $100 million is not a solution. I think you’d wind up with the same old-boys-club we have now, just with twice as many members to watch each other’s backs.
I’m reading this thread in parallel with the 47-page #OccupyWallStreet one. It’s very confusing, it’s got the same people in it, but in that one Spock’s got a goatee and Uhura is showing more skin.
I’m Kirk, right?
I don’t think any of this follows.
If a company manages to fire its CEO, then there is no reason to believe that a company wouldn’t replace him at roughly the same cost. There is no net effect to the regulatory scheme. No firm has market power, either. All are price-takers.
General salary decline is fine. People should make their marginal product. The point is, salary decline needs to be across the board, so that there would be no benefit to leaving the government to go back into the private sector because decline is happening simultaneously there, too.
You also assume that any collusion to maintain salaries would occur on the regulatory side. But it is not clear why this would be so. CEOs could just as easily collude not to be corrupt if they want to maintain their high salaries. This is fine, too. But in either case, collusion is very difficult to enforce as numbers of players grow larger and their individual interests diverge.
That’s the whole point. Under this scheme, a CEO who makes $100 million costs more than his ticket price and means that the government is going to come down harder and smarter on the firm. This effectively raises the costs to high executive pay, so a CEO worth $100 million is not going to get $100 million anymore.
Sorry, you’re the guy in the landing party wearing the red shirt.
To be fair, he has his moments. Regrettably, they are moments. But he has them!
That’s all fine.
I was responding to your specific point, in the text that I quoted. You were bemoaning the fact that “people on high 5-figure and low 6-figure incomes identify more with the 1% than with the 99%”, so that “we end up with situations where voters are unwilling to countenance tax increases for multimillionaires”. I responded by pointing out that many of these people suspect - with considerable justification, IMHO - that the “tax increases for multimillionaires” is just the slogan used to sell it to the public, and in the end it won’t really be “tax increases for multimillionaires”, and will ultimately impact them.
So now you’re saying that yes, in fact, you yourself would also be in favor of tax increases for people who “earn good money but are not in the super-rich class”. Which is pretty much the point I was making, and undermines your earlier post.
Doesn’t undermine it in the least.
The fact that i advocate a “tax the wealthy” plan in addition to a “tax the super-rich” plan doesn’t undermine the latter, and nor does it undermine my point about perceptions regarding what it takes to be in the top 1%.
While i believe in increased taxes on both the wealthy and the super-rich, and i fully accept that raising taxes only on the super-rich isn’t likely to get the country out of its budget hole, taxing those people more means that we will not have to raise taxes as much on the merely wealthy. As it stands, a person making two the three hundred grand in a comfortable, salaried position likely pays a considerably higher percentage of his or her income in tax than someone cruising by on 1 or 5 or 10 or 50 million a year from investments, company ownership, etc. That was the sense in which is was suggesting that they might have more in common with the 99%.
Yeah, but what they have in common with the 1% is that people like you are out to make them pay even more in taxes, as you acknowledge. So when you talk about taxing the multimillionaires and wonder why the “comfortable, salaried” people don’t realize that you’re not talking about them, the answer is that they realize that they’re also very much in your sights.
In addition, the same general principles that lead them to oppose increased taxes on themselves, also leads them to oppose increased taxes on the 1%.
In sum, the people in the “comfortable, salaried position” are facing the same dynamic as the super-rich, as you acknowledge, and thus tend to identify with them as regards to these issues.
Not denying that.
I’ve never argued that they don’t identify with them, and i’ve never argued that they have no reason to identify with them. Hell, there are people in the bottom 20% who still seem to identify with the super-rich in these debates, whether due to matters of real principle (such as libertarian beliefs in minimal government) or ignorant optimism (the belief that, one day, they will be in the top 1%).
My point was merely that, in terms of interests, thing might be a bit more complicated. For example, the merely well off have, in some ways, greater incentive to ensure a more equitable wealth distribution, because they are less able than the truly rich to isolate themselves from the consequences of social decay. Sure, they can buy a nice beige house in a gated suburb, but they probably still need to interact with the hoi polloi in their day-to-day lives, in a way that the really rich can avoid altogether if they want to.
And all of this is rather irrelevant to my initial point in the thread, which was that the OP is not talking about the 1% as a mere numerical figure, but was using the term as a shorthand, specifically, for “the super rich who crashed the economy and were never held accountable.”
OK.
I asn’t commenting on that, but now that you bring it up I would observe that while in theory people like the OP may be talking about the people you say, as a practical matter they tend to have very little ability or inclination to actually identify who the people are who “crashed the economy and were never held accountable”.
One indicater would be the OP himself, who called for someone to be made into cat food based on ignorance of that person’s role in the relevant company, let alone economy. But this is also true as a general rule.
As a result of this, people like myself tend to dismiss claims that the true ire is only directed “the super rich who crashed the economy and were never held accountable”.
First, they came for Warren Buffet; and I said nothing, because I am not Warren Buffet…
No consideration whatsoever of the fact that he is correct, I presume.
Well, i can’t speak for the OP, but for me there is an important difference between directing my ire, on the one hand, and directing my policy preferences, on the other.
The fact that i want the wealthy to pay more tax doesn’t mean that i hate them, or am angry at them. I have a friend who is comfortably in the top 2 or 3% of incomes. He’s a good guy, we enjoy each other’s company, and i still think he should pay more income tax. It’s not about him being evil, or bad, or even selfish; it’s about my own position on what constitutes good public policy.
Cite, you chucklefuck? Preferably something that actually exists in the same universe as the point you’re trying to make?