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If everyone else in a company doesn't do their best, a company won't do very well in the S&P either

For operational level workers, poor performance causes a delay or a slight increase in costs, they have very little power over the bottom line. That's why it's important for workers to have the option to unionize, because collectively they can have a significant impact, and therefore influence corporate decisions.

I have never heard of management being offshored, particularly at the board level, even though giving just 1 job the axe there is as good as 100 engineers or several hundred lower paying jobs.

If cutting 1 CEO can create several hundred lower paying jobs, then why stop there. Cut engineers, and you can get 10 more lower paid worker; for each technician you cut you can hire twice as many unskilled employees. Businesses don't run on quantity of employees.
Contrary to what you believe, American companies haven't hesitated to hire foreign CEOs. For example Pepsi, Dow, Gap, MasterCard, and Adobe, not to mention the former heads of Intel, Coke, McDonald's, Citigroup, Eli Lilly and Alcoa didn't come from the US. I'm sure there are many other foreign born CEOs holding jobs that an American could do.

I notice that CEO performance bonuses don't seem to take a hit when the company fails to track the S&P or even when it tanks. Not even when the problem is obviously foolish decisions made at the top.

Total CEO compensation tracks stock performance, but you are correct that bonuses do not correlate. But this discrepancy occurs whether the company is doing well or not. They get their bonus if the company tanks, but if the company does amazing, their bonus do not come close to reflecting their positive influence.

The problem we have today is the imbalance of power on the influence of government. CEOs and corporations will always look out for their own interests, it's just the nature of the beast. But because of crazy campaign contribution and lobbying laws, the voice of the people is ignored by our government. Frankly, I don't care how much executives make, what I do care about is how our elected representatives refuse to address the discrepancy between the growth of corporate profits and the non-existent growth of worker salaries. The necessary social change isn't going to come from demonizing corporate managers, it has to come from change in our laws and government to prevent such exploitation.

Really? Trickle down proven wrong over and over? Source on that?

Google is your friend. Here's one of very many.

http://www.faireconomy.org/research/TrickleDown.html

These figures appear in a number of places with no citation, however http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html appears to have done its homework, citing a number of studies. I have not gone digging further to verify the cited sources, but it looks good.

For a great deal of data running from 1983 to 2004, see Edward Wolff: "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze" (pdf) from this year.

You realise that this redistribution of wealth requires increased government borrowing.

Not at all true. The question of how much the government spends is seperate from what it spends it on; and these are seperate from how it gets funded.

If we wanted to increase social spending, we could do it and still have less government spending, if we decreased wasteful "defense" spending (we could halve our spending, save over $260 billion a year, and still outspend any other nation by a factor of five!), or spending on enforcing laws against "consensual crimes" ("War on Drugs" spending is about $50 billion a year).

And if we wanted to increase such spending without cutting other spending, we could - gasp! - raise taxes instead of borrowing. Just restoring the inheritance tax would raise about $20 billion a year. With that we could triple SCHIP expenditures (current a hair under $8 billion).

Notice you didn't see a thread here encouraging people to ask Democrats [about taxes and Al Qaeda]

Well, this being a site whose demographic is more united in a concern with science than on an agreement about tax policy or foreign policy, no, you didn't.

I'm not a Democrat or running for President. (Yet...I've hit the age requirement, and looking at the current field of candidates, might just write myself in 2008.) But I'd love to hear such questions put to candidates.

Here's how I'd answer: well, sir, if you want to lower taxes, you have to lower spending. Now, given that Americans pay lower taxes than most nations of comparable economic development, I don't find the issue tops on my priority list; especially when we're talking about increasing taxes on the unearned income of the wealthy, whose share of the tax burden has fallen.

But as it happens, a tremendous amount of money is being wasted on American "defense" spending, especially in the Iraq occupation. (Not to mention American and Iraqi lives.) U.S. military spending makes up close to half of the world total, with the next tier of nations (the UK, France, Japan and China) with around 5% each. We could almost halve our military budget and still be outspending any other nation five to one! But talk about such spending cuts - which would enable significant tax cuts - and neoconservatives go apeshit. It's as if they view the military as America's penis and fear it shrinking. (I fear they've confused their rifles and their "guns".)

Meanwhile, they love to make a big fuss about cutting spending on welfare and social programs, which make up a very small amount of federal spending and wouldn't save the average American more than a few dollars a year.

Politicians love to lump "entitlements" all together, ignoring that the bulk of that is Social Security (third rail!) and that a large chunk is military retirement spending and VA benefits, which rightly should be counted under military spending. Actual welfare and social development spending is fairly small.

As for Al Qaeda, "retreating" is not a concept that applies to fighting criminals. The whole notion that a "war" can be fought against a criminal gang like Al Qaeda (which was not in Iraq before we fucked it up, and would fall apart there if we weren't recruiting for them with screwups like Abu Ghraib) is the root of the problem here.

What will happen if we pull out immediately? The same thing that will happen if we pull out next year, or in five years, or in twenty years - chaos. The question is whether we are smart enough to cut our losses.

In the game of go, there is a common strategic error (at least for beginners like me) where a player will try to save a group of stones with a "ladder", laying down more sones and trying to escape. But a knowledgable player will see the pattern develop, knows his pieces are doomed, and lets them fall rather than wasting even more resources to have them and even more fall.

Iraq is a quagmire; Cheney knew it thirteen years ago. The invasion was a stupid and criminal thing to do. Bush and company should be impeached for their crimes, and the U.S. (and U.K., which really bears the root responsbibility for screwing up the Middle East back to the British Mandate) should compensate the Iraqi people as best it can and get the hell out.

No it is not. If the CEO compensation and the compensation of employees diverge by a factor of 500, even if profits of some shareholders are proportional

The purpose of allowing the corporations to come to being is to benefit the society as a whole not a few feudal lords, otherwise known as billionaire stockholders, and their semi-loyal vassals, the CEOs, at the expense of everyone else.

It is truly mind boggling how many excuses people like you come up with in order to justify the galloping return to feudalism-in-all-but-name, which is so advanced already in the USA. Not only that, many of you are apparently not satisifed about how fast can you become wholly owned and operated by your "betters". "Give me liberty or give me death" my ass.

And before you start going off about how average Joe American is a stockholder too, be sure to realize that 90% of all stocks in the USA are owned by less then 20% of the population, with over 30% of all companies owned by just the top 1%

Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked.

If by "work on something we got" you mean to retain the ever-expanding influence of mega-corporate wealth at the expense of citizenry (not to mention the fact that a handful of the same mega-corporations and mega-wealthy individuals own all of the media and thus control the democratic debate) then you might as well give up the pretense and simply accept Fascism as inevietable.

Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket.

That is because those GDP and the "real" compensation charts are really useless. GDP is accurate but represents merely the growth of the population. Note that it grows no matter what and the only irregular acceleration centered on 1945 when the WWII forced massive government-financed production increases of war materiel. The "real" compensation chart is meaningless since it is not indicating whose compensation it measures. If billionaires got richer much faster then workers (which is the actual case) the "real" compensation measured as the average would climb madly. Yet contrary to that chart we know that the compensation in middle class and lower levels has stagnated for close to a decade now.

For taxation levels, see this then correlate it to this.

Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked.

If by "work on something we got" you mean to retain the ever-expanding influence of mega-corporate wealth at the expense of citizenry (not to mention the fact that a handful of the same mega-corporations and mega-wealthy individuals own all of the media and thus control the democratic debate) then you might as well give up the pretense and simply accept Fascism as inevietable.

Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket.

That is because those GDP and the "real" compensation charts are really useless. GDP is accurate but represents merely the growth of the population. Note that it grows no matter what and the only irregular acceleration centered on 1945 when the WWII forced massive government-financed production increases of war materiel. The "real" compensation chart is meaningless since it is not indicating whose compensation it measures. If billionaires got richer much faster then workers (which is the actual case) the "real" compensation measured as the average would climb madly. Yet contrary to that chart we know that the compensation in middle class and lower levels has stagnated for close to a decade now.

For taxation levels, see this then correlate it to this.

Oh really? http://www.faireconomy.org/research/CEO_Pay_charts .html Would disagree. And that's just the last 15 years; decades ago, top level executives made about 13 or 14 times as much as the lowest paid worker in a company, on average.

Things have definitely changed, and the gap continues to widen. I believe anyone who has ever read history knows what happens when the gap gets too wide.

Hmmm... Are you sure that isn't what you have now? "the average worker -- who earned $41,861 in 2005 -- made about $400 less last year than what the average large-company CEO made in one day." and"by 2005 the average CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times that of an average worker ($41,861)." (That'd be 26200% of the normal devs' pay.) You could claim they're not "layman", but I'd bet the majority of them couldn't produce their company's products. Hide money in tax-sheltered off-short subsidiaries, make paper profits seem larger, and bail on golden parachutes, sure -- that they can do.

Do you actually know any CEOs? I do, along with various other people in high positions in companies. Contrary to the popular belief, most of these people are extremely hard-working, extremely ethical people.

...who collectively feel like they deserve to be paid more than 400x as much as a regular worker, then outsource our jobs to India. But of course, you never see their jobs being outsourced, even though I'm sure China and India have plenty of business school graduates who could do the job for a hundredth of the money. That's why we hate them.

But surely it's not hidden in a mattress anywhere. It's out in the economy, making the economy work. The money *is* changing hands. Sure, it's making Rich Bastard wealthier, but it's making us wealthier, too.

Average after-tax income gain, 1979-2000
Top 1% $576,400
Middle fifth $5,500
Bottom fifth $1,100

Average after-tax income gain, 1979-2000
Top 1% $576,400
Middle fifth $5,500
Bottom fifth $1,100

True capitalists are all for the right to give things away. That's among the biggest of reasons they oppose the death tax.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are not true capitalists? They don't oppose the estate tax. It is not difficult to find capitalists who support the idea of an estate tax.

The main reason it is an issue seems to be 18 very rich families have purchased enough influence to make it an issue.

Libertarians oppose the estate tax because they oppose taxation in general. Taxation and government are not necessarily anti-capitalist, though Libertarians may disagree.

You can't give things away that the government takes away first.

That is not always true. Generally, the government cannot take what you give away first. Mr. Buffett just greatly reduced the potential tax liability on his estate by giving away 85% of it. Every year, you can decrease your tax liability by giving away some money. In fact, you can give away so much money, that the government will give you back money that they have already taken from you. If the government takes your assets based on some criminal or civil action, your statement holds true; but I don't believe it is true in most cases in the context of federal taxation.

The incentive to give things away created by the estate tax is one of the arguments for keeping it. Sales taxes and usage fees generally create no such incentive.

As a matter of fact, because a communist society doesn't recognize the concept of private property, how can you give something away if you don't have the right to own it in the first place?

I'm certainly not an expert, but I believe the theory goes something like this. You give away the value of your labor in return for what you need. There is no need for charity, because you will not be denied something you need because someone else is claiming it as property. Of course, things work differently in practice; but, that is true of most political and economic theories.

The average CEO makes 430 times what the average employee makes. THIS is the main problem with American technology today. When CEO's are mostly fly-by-night postions, and the only interests they are looking out for are their own, it's no surprise that productivity drops while actual employed workers decreases. What justifies making over 400 times what one employee does? Do CEO's perform 400 times the work? No, in actuality, they have become less effective than they were 15 years ago, when they made 107 times what the average employee makes. This is the rift that corporations are building. More greed, less production. This cannot end in any good way. Unions are not the answer. Ending war profiteering, rampant handouts for the upper 4%, banning corporate lobbyists, and bringing power back to the middle class are the way to close the gap. Corporations should NOT have more power than citizens. Vote these fucking back talking assholes out of office. Normally, I'm all for the two party system, but libertarian is looking more and more sane every day. Sources: http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/EE2005.pdf Matt.

Instead of using your links, I went direct to their source. Going to the actual UFE report, I can see why you didn't link to it, because it's incredibly biased. It's not an economic report, it's a political hit piece.

"The ratio of average CEO pay (now $11.8 million) to worker pay (now $27,460) spiked up from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004."

This isn't an economic study, it's a hit piece. And you know it! It doesn't even come close to presenting objective statistics.

When you look closely, you see that their "average CEO" is actually the average CEO of the "367 leading US corporations". Nice skew there. Let's not look at all corporations, let's just look at the biggest ones. But wait! They don't even trust the numbers they use! They grabbed Business Week's numbers, and then admit there is more variation and less clarity when it comes to how" the companies whre included. Wow.

The Business Week numbers were not "salary", as you earlier claimed, but were instead for "salary, bonus, other annual compensation, restricted stock awards, LTIP payouts, and value realized from options exercised." Yet they are being compared to "worker pay". An employer pays out lot more money for for an eomployee than ever shows up in a paycheck. What about health benefits? Not every worker gets them, but enough do that surely they should be included in the calculation to determine "average."

And I still can't find their definition for "worker". I do see that they frequently use the term "production worker", but I don't know what that means either. There's a whole section on how they calculated "average CEO" compensations, but nothing on how they calculated "workers". Does "worker" include non-corporate workers? Because there sure are a lot of them. A high school dropout flipping burgers at a franchise is not a corporate worker (it's a franchise, duh). Neither is the guy stacking boxes of Bud at the corner liquor store. Or the migrant worker picking strawberries.

In short, their "CEO" to "worker" comparison stinks.

"The government wants those additional tax dollars from the Microsofts and EAs and 20th Century Foxes and Capitol records of the world."

Bzzt! The government doesn't make much money from corporations. In 2003, about 7% of government revenues came from corporate taxes:

http://www.faireconomy.org/images/2004TaxDayReport 2_files/image030.gif

93% came from individual income tax filings and other revenue sources. The cost of funding the U.S. government is squarely on the backs of individuals.

I think you guys are missing the point here.

Business Want
CS students that code and can perform IT functions at a minimum cost in salary and no additional training
Is this not the reason they have moved US jobs oversees? "They can't get it cheep enough --- go over sees"

Education want
Students to teach what ever the hell they think business wants at a minimum cost to develop new teaching material?
Is this not the reason that raw and applied R&D funding is disappearing in the US? (RE Microsoft, IBM, SUN, etc)

US CS Students want
Get a good job which is high paying enough to pay off the education debts and have money for toys

US Competitiveness
US federal funding has been reduced to raw research and development (Where did Bell Labs go?)
Businesses have also reduced all raw research and development (Where did Bell Labs go?)
Is this not why Education is no longer doing research and development? creating new material faster then they can print books?
Is this not why business now outsource to country which do have perform research?
Is this not why US CS Students are (and other IT professionals) not working outside their area of training or unemployed?

Stock Market want
Better profits faster from Business! No long term view, or focused on US competitiveness!
Is this not why negative public comments towards business which put more money into R&D?
The were also telling us in the 90's that the service economy has benefits, they forget to tell us about the outsourcing!

Business Executives want
Focused on their personal bottom line
Is this not why "CEOs of these businesses have climbed to three-times annual salary from just one-times yearly pay in the past year alone" (http://www.businessweek.com/careers/content/apr20 01/ca20010419_812.htm)
CEOs these days routinely make 300 to 500 times more than their average employees and sometimes much more.
(http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/LegislateAg ainstGreed.html)

Add to the income tax the following:
12.4% tax for social security and 2.9% Medicare levy (up to some limit - $80,000 ?? of gross income)
state income tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)
property tax (rate varies widely)
sales tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)

You can do a google search and see the income and sales tax rates in each state. This might interest you. (I did not read it carefully but it objects to the shift in taxes during recent years from the rich to the poor.)

Are you not aware, for example, that Bush completely blew Clinton's surplus and his balanced budget, the first time the budget was balanced for thirty years, and your supposedly conservative president just threw it away for a cheap political stunt, that tax cut you're so enamored of?

Or that No Child Left Behind is mind-boggingly underfunded and ineffective?

Or that Bush lies? Like, never tells the truth? Ever? Like, not once?

Do you choose not to believe this information, or have you just not heard about it?

And I'm just touching on a few of the more minor issues with Bush and his administration. Let's not even mention the total fuckup in Iraq, which surely you can't be as ignorant about as you claim. You'll excuse me if I don't believe you when you say you're not voting for Bush. You have no idea why you shouldn't vote for Bush. You're either not interested enough to educate yourself properly on the issues, or you're a dyed-in-the-wool Republican pretending to be independent to convince others that Dubya is truly god, as he himself believes. If you're the former, get a clue and turn off CNN (the Convservative News Network) and Faux News. If you're the latter, then just fuck off.

40 times the median salary? Not since Devo was popular:

"After declining for the last two years, the gap in pay between average workers and large company CEOs surpassed 300-to-1 in 2003. In 2002, the ratio stood at 282-to-1. In 1982, it was just 42-to-1."

http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2004/CEOPayRatio_ pr.html

FYI: the highest tax bracket is ~34%.
Though because of the way the tax system works, not all of the money is taxed at this rate. The tax scheme has brackets. This means that all the money that anyone makes up the next bracket is taxed at the rate of that bracket. For example: If the 1st bracket has a rate of 5%, and the 2nd bracket was at $2000 with a rate of 7%, and I made $2050, I would pay 5% of $2000 and 7% of $50.
This is sort of fair since my first $1000 is taxed just as much as a rich person's first $1000.

"It's the rich people...who create jobs"

Since when do rich people create jobs?
Do rich people have magical job-creating powers?
Do jobs just pop out of rich people's orfices?

The majority of jobs are created by small-medium sized businesses. Very few of the owners of these businesses would be considered rich. Rich people speculate on the stock and commodities markets. Rich people speculate on the currency markets.
Guess who usually ends up on the down side of the rich people's business interests?

As for you question of how can someone create more jobs than there are unemployed people: Unemployment statistics only measure those that are seeking a job. If wages were higher or work conditions were better, many people may decide to stop housewiving or work a second job and would join the masses of people seeking employment. In addition each year a large number of people enter the job market.

Most (nonfanatical) democrats don't base their ideas on taxation on "jealousy and class warfare", but instead on stopping a growing trend. The division of wealth in America is changing. The rich are becoming richer, and everyone else is getting poorer.

A little Google digging turns up these links:
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts. html
http://karmak.org/archive/2004/04/income&wealth.ht m

The second link also suggests it would be more effective to tax wealth than income (which is not something I've thought of before...so I'll have to think on it...).

Anyway, congrats on the self-employed thing and kudos for not passing the blame.

Yes, but what you don't realize is that the rich pay the VAST majority of income taxes. The top 50% of income earners pay 96% of all income taxes paid. (link).

That seems about right (or a little low), because it seems that the top 50% also control 97.2% of the wealth. (link) A Google researcher goes into it a little more. Following the news I've also continusouly heard about the continuing growth of the gap between the most wealthy and least, but I'm not sure if its real or just a statistical effect.

So then, it starts next year. From the site, "There is a civil war in the United States that starts in 2005. That conflict flares up and down for 10 years."

The "war" is supposedly between the "haves" and the "have nots" (locally and globally). I have heard these words being used to describe the growing wealth and power gap more in the last few years from mainstream sources than at any point in my lifetime. Not to mention, the gap is getting wider, and it's accelerating.

But, I guess we'll find out for sure next year. I just hope Canada is still allowing Americans through its borders at that time. heh heh... heh