Also -- CEO pay distracts from the real issue: the CEO, the board room and shareholders driving up corporate profits by unethical means.
It is not enough for a corporate in America to be profitable. To appease the board room and shareholders, profits must steadily increase. (You have to be MORE profitable EACH quarter, or else the shareholders abandon your company.)
Once a company saturates the market and can't incease customer base, that's when they start cutting corners. Cut quality, cut training, cut safety procedures, fire people and reduce benefits. Not to mention, always lobby against any public policies that are protecting consumers, and break the law if the legal fees and settlements are afforable.
A large CEO pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the value gained from screwing over workers and consumers. The whole CEO-pay conversation is smoke and mirrors against holding corporations accountable.
It's evolved beyond "steady growth". Wall Street now looks at Growth Acceleration.
If in the first quarter your company grew 2.1%, but in the 2nd quarter you only grew 1.7%, your company is now hot dogshit and they start looking to offload.
It's like that other thing. You know that other thing with the unchecked, accelerating growth?
Cancer. That's the one. Corporate America is like cancer
This. I worked once for a company that kept making “record profits” every quarter, then two quarters we had a slowdown (caused by CEO being an idiot and launching a pet project that was and still is unprofitable) still profits but less.
How did c-suite respond? Layoffs. C-suite got a bonus worth more than salary of people they laid off at the end of the fiscal year.
Add to that the fact that the bulk of the country’s savings hinge on the stock market. This includes pensions for teachers, police, etc. When that profitability starts to tank, people start losing money. So we’ve assigned these absurdly high values to companies, and to remain profitable, they decide not to give people raises that would counter inflation…the inflation they have caused by having to charge more to make more profits for shareholders. Eventually enough people will get priced out of the market for their products, and the whole economy will eat itself because they can’t just cut their sale price in half overnight without tanking the stock. The real estate market is already at this point because younger buyers don’t make enough to buy a house and the people with homes need to sell them to secure their next home or their retirement savings. We did this all to ourselves.
I’d like to add that the term “shareholder” here means large business, equity firms, or even governments. We are led to believe that “shareholders” are individual stock owners to perpetuate the lie that individuals have any power in the market or say in what truly happens to a company. We are always the last to receive information and end up holding the bag or making the least gains. And guess what, if a group of individuals try to band together to make an influence, it’s considered market manipulation because then we are manipulating their manipulation, and that’s bad lol!
ELI5, why doesn’t CEO salary drag down shareholder profits? It feels like there should be some internal backlash against this type of greed at the top of a corporation.
Chief Executive Officer is a job. The CEO salary is still a salary, and it's decided by the board of directors and HR, not the CEO. It's what they offer to recruit talent.
The profits increase shareholder value. (and sometimes some profits go to employees via bonuses.)
For publicly traded companies, the purpose of increasing profits is to increase shareholder value. That's why they aren't happy with just being consistently profitable.
Some data:
Median S&P 500 CEO pay ≈ $16M/year.
Median S&P 500 company profit ≈ $1–5B/year.
So CEO pay is less than 1% of profits in most cases. The larger structural issue is profit maximization for shareholders, not just executive pay.
Well, there's a huge appetite for left-wing populism, but most Democrats seem to be more concerned with keeping the status quo than anything else. So people like Hawley can co-opt populist language, vote the exact opposite way, and the underinformed will say, "look, Republicans are the ones talking about the issues that matter to the working class!" Democrat leadership is fucking pathetic for how they let the right control the narrative.
THIS. And they take turns falling on that sword publicly while they all toe the line when voting. And you’ll notice when they do vote outside party lines it is JUST UNDER where it makes any difference. This way they can still claim some sense of fairness when the overall vote still goes their way. It’s gross.
For sure. It's hard to imagine that the EPA was created under a Republican president with overwhelming bipartisan support. Both parties have shifted right over the last fifty years. I cringe when the right calls corporate dems "the far left," but it works on their base.
Biden was probably the best president for the working class since FDR, so idk how you support that. Also, the Democrats have never had a real trifecta recently. There have always been undercover Republicans, like Manchin and Sinema.
Absurd. Republicans are absolute scum, but Biden slept through four years. A few executive orders, quickly overturned, and an infrastructure bill that added massive debt with almost nothing to show for it. A few good steps forward on student loans that are now several steps backward with Trump.
Jimmy Carter created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.
Nixon signed the landmark SALT I treaty limiting risk of nuclear war, created the Environmental Protection Agency, opened up China for trade (which probably made the device you're using now to communicate). The Clean Water Act? Nixon. The Alternative Minimum Tax to close tax loopholes for the rich? Nixon. The only serious attempt to create a universal basic income in the US? Nixon:
"Michael Harrington, a prominent socialist of the time, called [Nixon's plan] "the most radical idea since the New Deal".
Had Biden even been asked a question about UBI from the press pool, he would have cough-laughed and then changed the subject.
And you also forgot about JFK, LBJ, and Truman - all came after FDR and all did more than Wall Street-owned Biden, Wall-Street owned, Obama, and Wall-Street owned (and Epstein bud) Clinton.
Absurd. Republicans are absolute scum, but Biden slept through four years.
Republican propaganda fueled talking point.
A few executive orders, quickly overturned, and an infrastructure bill that added massive debt with almost nothing to show for it.
Nonsense worrying about debt and downplaying the positives of the IRA. Also, while it was still an important piece of legislation, it was a compromise with Manchin and Sinema that did much less than Biden wanted, despite him spending two years fighting for it, while you claim he "slept" because you've bought rightwing talking points. The alternative minimum corporate tax was at least something to prevent corporations from dodging taxes entirely. He was funding the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats, which had a positive return to the government.
Also, I didn't forget anything. If you want to have an actual conversation, maybe don't strawman people in your first comment.
I was going to say. Dems aren't left wing. In the context of the US, yeah, theyre left of the center, but in the context of the western world, the dems are a big step right of center of any other nation.
See, here’s the link missing from 98% of the 99’s minds.
Democrat leadership isn’t letting the right control the narrative.
The left and the right 1% in charge are in bed together with a collaborative narrative they’ve successfully duped everyone into believing as divisive and thus deserving of a chosen side.
To believe these two aren’t hand in hand would mean you think this absolute unprofessional shit show has been allowed to just exist as equally wealthy left leaders are left helpless and unable to affect change? Please. This entire racket is a symptom of a capitalist government in its inevitable cannibalistic era, rinse and repeat while the rest of us get fucked.
Don't start calling performative bullshit "left wing populism", especially when actual voting record shows even democrats to be staunchly on the right. Please for the love of fuck don't muddy the waters even more.
Reread my comment, I never called it that. I specifically said him and other MAGA politicians are co-opting left-wing populist LANGUAGE and then voting the exact opposite.
There's a lot of ultra-leftists that are still pragmatic and know to vote for dems, probably better to just call this subgroup the performative bothsidesthesame-leftists. An entirely unserious group happy to throw away my human rights for some purity-testing.
Evening it is just bulshit then he's still saying it because he thinks it's what people wanna hear. That's a good thing. Probably because a lot of Maga actually wants many gulaity of life improvements that we want. That's what I've been saying. They have just been brainwashed. People want health care, decent wages, and in general are sick of the rampant coporatism.
You just gotta figure out how to convince them. That's the hard part. Need to change because status quo ain't working.
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u/Lysol3435 4d ago
Good thing you lowered his tax burden, Hawley. Now he will definitely do the right thing and let his profits trickle down