“Now we know why CEOs didn’t want this data released,”

[coloradoatheist]

So let me get this straight. We have people here trying to justify these obscene wages?

The one of a guy throwing a football around?

Isn't it CEOs that decided the football player needed to make that money?

Oh, and BTW, nice dodge of the question. You scramble like a quarterback.

It would be the owners of them team that would have the say. Like there are people willing to pay a CEO 19 million.

 

[ZiprHead]

Isn't it CEOs that decided the football player needed to make that money?

Oh, and BTW, nice dodge of the question. You scramble like a quarterback.

It would be the owners of them team that would have the say. Like there are people willing to pay a CEO 19 million.

 

[Elixir]

Isn't it CEOs that decided the football player needed to make that money?

Oh, and BTW, nice dodge of the question. You scramble like a quarterback.

It would be the owners of them team that would have the say. Like there are people willing to pay a CEO 19 million.

That's not what is being discussed AFAICS. It relates more to poor Ginni Rometty of IBM, who drew a paltry $1,600,000 salary in 2017. Her total compensation was $96,764,750.00.
I see no way to rationalize that, even though it's more understandable than John Hammergren of McKesson knocking down over $131m in one year... while drug prices soar out of control.

 

[dismal]

So let me get this straight. We have people here trying to justify these obscene wages?

Justify? Why would I need to justify what every CEO makes? When my company hires a CEO we do justify what he makes. When you hire a CEO you should be free to pay zir whatever you want. If you get a hard on paying them 5,000,000 times what your average worker makes my attitude is "your money, your choice". If you feel the way to go is to hire a random guy off the street and pay zir 1.0987522134X what the average employee makes it's also "your money, your choice".

 

[coloradoatheist]

Isn't it CEOs that decided the football player needed to make that money?

Oh, and BTW, nice dodge of the question. You scramble like a quarterback.

It would be the owners of them team that would have the say. Like there are people willing to pay a CEO 19 million.

View attachment 15737

So for a QB in the draft, Multiple people pick the person and then the it would negotiations over pay between the person and the General Manager (since the don't have CEOs in football). The GM is like the CEO and picks him. The GM is responsbile to the owner like a CEO is responsible to the board and the board is responsible to the shareholders. The shareholders are willing to pay the CEO that money to represent their interests just like the GM is picking the QB to play QB.

 

[bilby]

They are ordinary humans beings.

Very gregarious. Politicians.

Nothing else very special.

They exist because humans are not very far removed from kings and the delusions of leaders with special powers and insight.

Since college I have never been more than two steps away from the CEO. My current job is the only one where I don't routinely talk to the CEO.

None have been gregarious. None have been politicians.

One telling incident with the one I used to work for:

I showed him my copy of Railroad Tycoon. He played it on my system for 12 hours that day, then the next morning went out and got his own copy. He really enjoyed trying to make the most efficient network and he was very good at it.

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It is called living and seeing these people and listening to them.

Does this mean that you have personally interacted with CEOs, and have discussed what their jobs entail with them? Do you have first-hand interactions with CEOs?

Have you personally interacted with CEOs at the lofty level of making thousands of dollars per hour?

View attachment 15728

Whoever wrote that crap didn't think.

Spread that CEO pay over the workers and see how much of a raise it produces.

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It is called living and seeing these people and listening to them.

Does this mean that you have personally interacted with CEOs, and have discussed what their jobs entail with them? Do you have first-hand interactions with CEOs?

I have listened to them being interviewed and answering questions. I read their writings.

It is sales jargon and nothing else.

They are usually very charming.

CULT OF PERSONALITY.

In other words, you know nothing.

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There should be a sliding scale of tax breaks. The bigger the gap, the more the corp has to pay into social services. Stick to 100x and you get no penalties.

Why tax the corporations, who can just restructure to avoid the taxes? Far better to tax individual income.

Close the loopholes on personal income; set a few new tax brackets above the existing structure, and apply very high rates to the top brackets. A person earning $10,000,000 per annum pays less than 40% on earnings over half a million dollars. He can afford to pay (for example)80% tax on income above $1m, 90% above $5m, and 99% above $8m. He's not going to go hungry. And if the top rates are sufficiently high, they set an effective ceiling on earnings.

No, they set a threshold beyond which you get huge tax evasion.

Tax evasion is deliberately built into the tax system. It need not be there; If governments didn't want rich people to be able to evade taxes, they could easily prevent them from doing so.

A loophole is just a concealed tax cut. And tax cuts for the hyper-rich have always been popular with their bribe taking political buddies. How do you think you tax structure got to the point where progressivity completely vanishes above a measly half-million per annum? Is a billion a year really so similar to half a million?

 

[Emily Lake]

Do they make those decisions on their own or do they use input and data obtained and compiled by those below them?

Both. They use data compiled from other people... but no single other person has all of the necessary information. The CEO usually needs to compile information from multiple different sources, representing different impacts and risks, and weight them in totality before coming to a final decision. And they have to do that a lot.

So let me get this straight. We have people here trying to justify these obscene wages?

Depends on how you look at it I guess. I personally think that the very highest paid CEOs are receiving disproportionate compensation, at a level that is really hard to accept as reasonable. On the other hand, however, I also recognize that the overwhelming majority of CEOs don't make nearly that much. My CEO probably makes about 50 times what I do... and I make probably somewhere around 7 times as much as the lowest paid employees here. Knowing the degree of risk that he faces, and the magnitude of decisions that he deals with, I don't think his compensation is unacceptable. I know that I simply would not be willing to take on that much responsibility and risk for much less than that. A little less, maybe, but not a whole lot. I certainly wouldn't do it for $500K, probably not even for $1M. I would definitely be willing to do it for less than $100M... but there's a bit of a range in there.

 

[bilby]

TBH, what I don't understand is what the point is of earning $100m a year. What can you do with that, that you couldn't do with $10m? If someone paid me as little as $1m/year, I would retire after a couple of years, with a nice house, a couple of nice cars, and all the food and drink I want, and with plenty of spending money for hobbies.

Most of what the super rich spend their money on seems utterly pointless - who needs a second private jet? Who needs a fleet of Supercars? Why pay $100,000 return to fly Sydney to London in a suite, when you could pay $15,000 for a first class cabin, or $5,000 for a business class bed?

And even assuming that all this frippery is worth the vast expense, most hyper-wealthy people are still unable to spend it as fast as it accumulates. What the fuck is the point of making more money than you can spend, EVEN IF we accept, ad argumentum, that all the incredibly expensive luxuries are worthwhile?

These aristocrats have been accumulating wealth for (in some cases) a millennium. Each generation wealthier than the last. WHY? What the fuck is the point? It's like accumulating wealth is an objective in its own right. If they accumulated old newspapers instead of dollars, we would sadly shake our heads at the poor crazy obsessive guy.

But when it's dollars, not only do we consider them sane; We somehow imagine them worthy of deep respect. It's nuts.

 

[untermensche]

If you have labor and cannot find something productive for them to do then you have failed at leadership.

Not always, if demand drastically drops for your product you will need to do something. After the mortgage there would need to be a reduction. It's also one area where you version would like to drive any efficiencies.

Well are these people special or not?

Are they superhumans deserving to live like princes or not?

If they are special they can surely find something for people to do.

If they are ordinary schmucks just riding on momentum from the past they can't.

 

[untermensche]

They are ordinary humans beings.

Very gregarious. Politicians.

Nothing else very special.

They exist because humans are not very far removed from kings and the delusions of leaders with special powers and insight.

Since college I have never been more than two steps away from the CEO. My current job is the only one where I don't routinely talk to the CEO.

None have been gregarious. None have been politicians.

One telling incident with the one I used to work for:

I showed him my copy of Railroad Tycoon. He played it on my system for 12 hours that day, then the next morning went out and got his own copy. He really enjoyed trying to make the most efficient network and he was very good at it.

12 year old kids are great at that game too.

Don't look too close. There is something brown on your nose.

 

[Lion IRC]

So let me get this straight. We have people here trying to justify these obscene wages?

I agree they are obscene not to mention illogical and hugely disproportionate.
But for some reason there are shareholders willing to pay those amounts of money - and it IS their money after all.

 

[untermensche]

People pay a lot of money for a lot of things that are not really worth much more than some other product much cheaper.

People drive around in $500,000 cars.

They do not fly or solve any problem.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Penneys, Macys, and Walmart, all from the meme above are all in the process of closing stores. Sounds like their CEOs are making great decisions.

It's always a possibility. There's no guarantee that a CEO will always make good decisions, but there's also no guarantee that even consistently good decisions can inure a company against a changing environment and competitive pressure.

On a broader note... it might be worth considering the sheer volume of important decisions made by CEOs on a daily basis. As a manager, I make key decisions maybe once a month, generally around prioritization and intake of work for my team. My Director makes key decisions on the order of once a week - not just in terms of prioritization and work intake, but also in terms of investments and strategic direction for our department, with consideration for the impact of those decisions to the long-term health of the company. My CFO makes multiple decisions daily about prioritization of work, strategy, and investments for both long term and short term objectives, affecting the work and resources of a large portion of the company, and balances competing objectives and strategies across a wide variety of topics that all interrelate. My CEO does all of that and more, every day, for the entire company, across all aspects of our business.

In short, I make important decisions on behalf of my company maybe once a month. My CEO makes important decisions on behalf of my company maybe once every two hours.

Do they make those decisions on their own or do they use input and data obtained and compiled by those below them?

It's not the data gathering that you have a CEO for. You have a CEO to make the decisions. (And note that that includes what data to gather.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Isn't it CEOs that decided the football player needed to make that money?

Oh, and BTW, nice dodge of the question. You scramble like a quarterback.

It would be the owners of them team that would have the say. Like there are people willing to pay a CEO 19 million.

That's not what is being discussed AFAICS. It relates more to poor Ginni Rometty of IBM, who drew a paltry $1,600,000 salary in 2017. Her total compensation was $96,764,750.00.
I see no way to rationalize that, even though it's more understandable than John Hammergren of McKesson knocking down over $131m in one year... while drug prices soar out of control.

Shoot the accountants over this sort of stuff.

The problem is how stock options are accounted for. It's much "cheaper" for the company to pay in options and that results in some very big payoffs at times when the stock price goes up a lot. It's bad for the companies (it encourages higher risk strategies than they should be employing) and the attractiveness is an accounting gimmick. Fix that and you'll see more sensible pay structures.

 

[dismal]

If you have labor and cannot find something productive for them to do then you have failed at leadership.

Not always, if demand drastically drops for your product you will need to do something. After the mortgage there would need to be a reduction. It's also one area where you version would like to drive any efficiencies.

Well are these people special or not?

Are they superhumans deserving to live like princes or not?

If they are special they can surely find something for people to do.

If they are ordinary schmucks just riding on momentum from the past they can't.

Nobody has suggested you be required to pay anybody anything. When it's your money you should be free to pay anyone whatever you want. If you can't handle that, you're the fascist. As usual.

 

[untermensche]

Well are these people special or not?

Are they superhumans deserving to live like princes or not?

If they are special they can surely find something for people to do.

If they are ordinary schmucks just riding on momentum from the past they can't.

Nobody has suggested you be required to pay anybody anything. When it's your money you should be free to pay anyone whatever you want. If you can't handle that, you're the fascist. As usual.

Are these people special in any way?

What are you paying for?

CULT OF PERSONALITY.

 

[dismal]

Well are these people special or not?

Are they superhumans deserving to live like princes or not?

If they are special they can surely find something for people to do.

If they are ordinary schmucks just riding on momentum from the past they can't.

Nobody has suggested you be required to pay anybody anything. When it's your money you should be free to pay anyone whatever you want. If you can't handle that, you're the fascist. As usual.

Are these people special in any way?

What are you paying for?

CULT OF PERSONALITY.

We don't have to agree on whether anyone is special. I will hire who I think is special to be CEO of my companies and pay them as I see fit. You can hire someone off the street if you feel that's best when it's your money. This is called "freedom".

 

[DBT]

I think we should compare the top 225 athletes in all the major sports and see who wins with the CEOs. it would be close I bet.

Sport star renumeration (amongst a range of things) falls into the same category; excessive. It's just that the subject of this thread happens to be CEO salary and bonus rates.

 

[DBT]

CEO's are in a highly responsible position and should be paid well for their work, but not at their current rates and bonuses.
The ratio between those at the top and the rest of us has gotten way out of hand. To the point of obscenity.

I'm surprised that there is, generally speaking, no real sense of outrage. Or any apparent likelihood of addressing the issue in the foreseeable future.

There's not as much outrage, because your generality isn't actually true. A relatively small number of CEOs make obscene amounts of money for their jobs, but most don't. There are a LOT of small and mid-sized companies that get left off of that measure. There was a link posted earlier... the average effective hourly rate for CEOs is less than the average effective hourly rate for primary care doctors. And given that there's a relatively small number of CEOs making exorbitant salaries... that means that there are a whole lot of CEOs who make less than your family doctor does.

This is the problem;
Quote;
''Across all companies, the average CEO pay was $13.8 million per year, the average median worker pay was about $77,800, and the average ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay was 204. In other words, on average, CEOs earn around 204 times what his or her median worker earns.Aug 25, 2015''

Nor is this the only problem, just that this is the topic of this thread.

 

[DBT]

So let me get this straight. We have people here trying to justify these obscene wages?

It appears so. It is more than a little odd.

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TBH, what I don't understand is what the point is of earning $100m a year. What can you do with that, that you couldn't do with $10m? If someone paid me as little as $1m/year, I would retire after a couple of years, with a nice house, a couple of nice cars, and all the food and drink I want, and with plenty of spending money for hobbies.

Most of what the super rich spend their money on seems utterly pointless - who needs a second private jet? Who needs a fleet of Supercars? Why pay $100,000 return to fly Sydney to London in a suite, when you could pay $15,000 for a first class cabin, or $5,000 for a business class bed?

And even assuming that all this frippery is worth the vast expense, most hyper-wealthy people are still unable to spend it as fast as it accumulates. What the fuck is the point of making more money than you can spend, EVEN IF we accept, ad argumentum, that all the incredibly expensive luxuries are worthwhile?

These aristocrats have been accumulating wealth for (in some cases) a millennium. Each generation wealthier than the last. WHY? What the fuck is the point? It's like accumulating wealth is an objective in its own right. If they accumulated old newspapers instead of dollars, we would sadly shake our heads at the poor crazy obsessive guy.

But when it's dollars, not only do we consider them sane; We somehow imagine them worthy of deep respect. It's nuts.

Not only nuts. Outrageous.