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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Dec 28, 2017 - 10:37am PT
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The "capitalist" hires labor who has chosen not to start their own businesses, for whatever reason. No one coerces thee employee to work for him - the employee has a choice to start his own business or work for any of the millions of companies in this country.
Yup!
And most of those companies will treat him/her really well, if s/he is a decent employee. Those are surprising hard to come by in this era of entitlement. But good ones (you know, competently work their actual paid hours without spending much time texting on the phone, shopping online, taking personal calls, etc.) are pure gold and typically treated as such.
All the froth of this thread concerns the wages of entry-level jobs. The vast majority of jobs in this nation are not entry-level, minimum wage jobs.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2015/home.htm
Lots of hand-wringing about 3.3% of all jobs, particularly when these are jobs that nobody is supposed to "end up" in trying to support a family. But, as is typical on the Taco Stand, there's no sense of proportion.
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Dec 29, 2017 - 09:42am PT
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I've never felt denied an opportunity to go make more money. I don't blame any person or system or 1% or whatever for where I am. It was all of my choices. I've been around the planet a few times, you can't say these things in many countries.
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Lorenzo
Trad climber
Portland Oregon
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Dec 29, 2017 - 09:57am PT
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capitalism is founded, first and foremost, on exploitation and that this exploitation is fundamental.
capitalism, whatever we may grant to it as an ‘engine of wealth creation’, is an essentially irrational economic system geared not towards the maximization of material wealth in general (as is often implied), but merely towards the maximization of wealth in so far as it can be appropriated as private profit.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/capitalism-straight-up/5624307
There is no such thing as capitalism in te modern world. Capitalism depends on competition and the willingness to allow poorly run organizations to fail and become extinct, to be replaced by new entities that run more efficiently.
We now have welfare for those in power and companies “too big to fail”. See who the new tax code benefits.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Dec 29, 2017 - 10:29am PT
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The illegal drug trade is true capitalism. Somalia may be true capitalism because it has had a non or barely functioning govt for decades.
I think the big banks should have been allowed to fail if they were insolvent.The US govt would have had to set up an emergency facility to keep the flow of money and loans going. I don't know if that had been practical so you would have to ask someone who knows.
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Lorenzo
Trad climber
Portland Oregon
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Dec 29, 2017 - 12:38pm PT
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Bankrupcy filings are meaningless.
Donald Trump is at least six of those filings, all chapter 11. I’ll bet he didn’t lose a dime in any of them, and the entities didn’t disappear.
The current bankrupcy laws just screw the people who are owed money, so another welfare for the rich.
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Bruce Morris
Trad climber
Soulsbyville, California
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Dec 29, 2017 - 12:51pm PT
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Boy, money sure gets people talkin', doesn't it?
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Dec 29, 2017 - 02:36pm PT
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Big money talks
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Dec 30, 2017 - 03:38am PT
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https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2015/home.htm
Lots of hand-wringing about 3.3% of all jobs, particularly when these are jobs that nobody is supposed to "end up" in trying to support a family. But, as is typical on the Taco Stand, there's no sense of proportion
That is a really dumb statistic. The vast majority of Americans live in states with state minimum wage laws that are over $7.25. For most Americans it is illegal to pay them "minimum wage" by the standards that survey sets. It also doesn't account for people working in jobs that are near the minimum wage, or people who started at the minimum wage and got a raise. Complete your 6-month probationary period at Burger King, get a 10 cent pay increase and that's supposed to mean you're no longer in an entry level job? Yeah fukin right...
Where I work (Yosemite) I'd bet probably over 70% of the jobs start at minimum wage. There's no doubt that's much higher than the national average, but I think A LOT of jobs in America these days are "entry level". Way more than 3%.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Dec 30, 2017 - 04:21am PT
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The illegal drug trade is true capitalism. The complete prohibition of trade and individual property rights is the exact opposite of capitalism. Everything nasty that comes out of the drug trade does so because it is a black market. In free markets the government doesn't kick in your door to confiscate the goods you have produced and then drag you off to prison for trying to sell them. In all societies where commerce is more heavily regulated you will find more black markets. It is the natural outcome of government interference in supply and demand. I think someone already tried explaining this upthread.
The problem with trying to talk about economics in this country is that half the people absolutely hate "capitalism". Mind you, they don't hate the idea of private property, or of the exchange of goods and services, they just hate the word capitalism and attach to it everything they see wrong with America, even if many of these things have nothing to do with capitalism as economists would define the term. The other half of the population has the equal reaction to, and misunderstanding of, the word socialism.
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unlocked gait
Gym climber
the range
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Dec 30, 2017 - 07:43am PT
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i'm ade some extra cash
for playing jesus in the mall.
i had to lay in the manger, real still-like
and santa was like 100' away
perpetuating the great lie,
and i was also playing
the charlatan. 10 bucks an hour.
and santa would pass me his
flask on the quarter hour.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Dec 30, 2017 - 08:52am PT
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Not enough we have "Bad Santa" now we have "Bad Jesus" as well
Did the manger donkeys moonlight as shoplifters?
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unlocked gait
Gym climber
the range
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Dec 30, 2017 - 09:40am PT
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i don't know donkey's wage
but they were only giving 3 dollars an hour
for joseph.
; (those are pale blue eyes)
i staid the course for the spotlight role
then this blond lass arrived
strivin for the mary character
but the gal was pregnant
i don't think she even read the bible.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Dec 30, 2017 - 09:54am PT
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Tha average IQ in the USA is below 100. What is your source for that?
You know 100 is the median IQ, right? So for that to be true it would mean, in comparison to the rest of humanity...
Americans are...
quantifiably
st00pid.
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chipper_shredder
Social climber
outinthecuts
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 30, 2017 - 10:56am PT
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• Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was the highest-paid CEO in 2015, with $94.5 million in total compensation, including salary, bonus, perks and options. That's 2,560 times what an average worker made during the same year.
• CBS could have hypothetically hired 1,530 workers for the $56,400,000 in total compensation paid to CEO Leslie Moonves in 2015.
• Walt Disney paid Robert Iger $43.5 million in 2015. A total of $22.34 million of this compensation came in the form of bonus payment while Iger's actual salary was just $2.5 million. Perks, stocks and options made up the rest. Disney could have hypothetically hired 1,180 employees for the same money.
• Yahoo paid its CEO, Marissa Mayer, $36 million in total compensation for 2015, equal to the total salary of around 980 workers. Her replacement, Thomas McInerney, will be paid double Mayer's base salary of $1 million.
• Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes made as much money as about 850 workers with his $31.5 million in total compensation in 2015. Just $2 million of that was his salary: He also pocketed a $13.36 million bonus, with the rest coming from stocks, options and other perks.
• Sirius XM Holdings paid James Mayer $29.2 million in 2015. The company could have hired about 790 workers for what Mayer made.
• Comcast could have used the $27.5 million paid to CEO Brian Roberts to provide jobs to about 750 workers at the average worker salary in 2015.
• Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson took a hefty pay cut to become Secretary of State, giving up his $24.3 million total compensation from Exxon Mobile for an annual government salary of just $207,800 in 2017. For what Tillerson was paid by Exxon, around 660 workers could have been hired.
• CVS paid Larry Merlo about 620 times what the average worker makes, providing Merlo with $22.9 million in total compensation in 2015. This was actually a pay cut from the $24.3 million he made in 2014.
• AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was paid the same as about 610 workers, with total compensation of $22.4 million in 2014.
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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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Dec 30, 2017 - 11:03am PT
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Edit: ^^^^ What's your point, other than to be divisive and post random statistic from a small population sample of companies?
"The argument “every person can start a business or get a better job” is unrealistic."
Why is that unrealistic?
If the black, uneducated guy I spent time with in WV (did I mention he spent 10 years in prison for attempted murder?) can make 6 figures in the mines, anyone can, if they want to. He is not an isolated case.
Half the crew, at least, I work with now have only GED's or high school educations, and make $20-25 an hour as a base. The opportunity is there, if one has the desire. Most started at a gas station or somewhere else minimum wage and wanted something better.
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chipper_shredder
Social climber
outinthecuts
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 30, 2017 - 11:08am PT
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CEO pay remains high relative to the pay of typical workers and high-wage earners
Report • By Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder • July 20, 2017
Summary
What this report finds: This report looks at trends in CEO compensation using two measures of compensation. The first measure includes stock options realized (in addition to salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts). By this measure, in 2016 CEOs in America’s largest firms made an average of $15.6 million in compensation, or 271 times the annual average pay of the typical worker. While the 2016 CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 271-to-1 is down from 299-to-1 in 2014 and 286-to-1 in 2015, it is still light years beyond the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965 and the 59-to-1 ratio in 1989. The average CEO in a large firm now earns 5.33 times the annual earnings of the average very-high-wage earner (earner in the top 0.1 percent).
Because the decision to realize, or cash in, stock options tends to fluctuate with current and potential stock market trends (since people tend to cash in their stock options when it’s most advantageous for them to do so), we also look at another measure of CEO compensation to get a more complete picture of trends in CEO compensation. This measure tracks the value of stock options granted, reflecting the value of the options at the time they are granted. By this measure, CEO compensation rose to $13.0 million in 2016, up from $12.5 million in 2015.
By either measure CEO compensation is very high relative to the compensation of a typical worker or even that of an earner in the top 0.1 percent, and it has grown far faster than stock prices or corporate profits. The explanation for the falloff in CEO compensation associated with realized stock options is unclear: neither stock prices nor an accumulation of unexercised options provide an explanation. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.
Why it matters: Regardless of how it’s measured, CEO pay continues to be very, very high and has grown far faster in recent decades than typical worker pay. Exorbitant CEO pay means that the fruits of economic growth are not going to ordinary workers, since the higher CEO pay does not reflect correspondingly higher output. CEO compensation has risen by 807 or 937 percent (depending on how it is measured—using stock options granted or stock options realized, respectively) from 1978 to 2016. At 937 percent, that rise is more than 70 percent faster than the rise in the stock market; both measures are substantially greater than the painfully slow 11.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.
How we can solve the problem: Over the last several decades CEO pay has grown a lot faster than profits, than the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, and than the wages of college graduates. This means that CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because they are more productive or have special talent or have more education. If CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment. Policy solutions that would limit and reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions without hurting the economy include:
Reinstate higher marginal income tax rates at the very top.
Remove the tax break for executive performance pay.
Set corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation.
Allow greater use of “say on pay,” which allows a firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.
Introduction and key findings
Chief executive officers of America’s largest firms earn far more today than they did in the mid-1990s and especially since the 1960s or late 1970s. They also earn far more than the typical worker and their pay has grown much faster. When we look at CEO compensation using a measure that includes stock options realized (as described below), CEO pay peaked in 2000, at $20.7 million (in 2016 dollars)—376 times the pay of the typical worker. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio dropped to 197-to-1 by 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis, rose to 299-to-1 by 2014, and has declined since 2014. The projected 2016 ratio is 271-to-1.
It is unclear whether this recent decline is the beginning of a downward trend in how CEO compensation is awarded or whether it is a byproduct of how compensation is measured in conjunction with variations in the stock market (more on this below). What is clear, though, is that CEO pay continues to be dramatically higher now than it was in the decades before the turn of the millennium: in 1995, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 123-to-1; in 1989, it was 59-to-1; in 1978, it was 30-to-1; and in 1965, it was 20-to-1.
This report is part of an ongoing series of annual reports monitoring trends in CEO compensation. To analyze current trends in CEO compensation, we use two different measures of compensation. The first measure includes stock options realized (in addition to salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts). Because stock-options-realized compensation tends to fluctuate with the stock market (since people tend to cash in their stock options when it’s most advantageous for them to do so), we also look at another measure of CEO compensation to get a more complete picture of trends in CEO compensation. This measure tracks the value of stock options granted, thus focusing on their value at the time they are granted rather than when they are cashed in.
As noted above, by one measure (the measure that uses stock options realized), average CEO compensation fell in 2016 (by 4.3 percent). However, compensation measured this way in fact declined only for those CEOs in the top-earning fifth of CEOs; pay for CEOs in the bottom 80 percent actually rose, with the declines for the top fifth of CEOs driving the decline in the average. By another measure (the measure that uses stock options granted), CEO compensation rose 3.8 percent in 2016, including for those CEOs with the highest compensation in our sample.
CEO pay has historically been closely associated with the health of the stock market. Amid a healthy recovery on Wall Street following the Great Recession, CEOs enjoyed outsized income gains even relative to other very-high-wage earners. Outsized CEO pay growth has had spillover effects, pulling up the pay of other executives and managers, who constitute a larger group of workers than is commonly recognized.1 Consequently, the growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares of the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007 (Bivens and Mishel 2013; Bakija, Cole, and Heim 2012). Since then, income growth has remained unbalanced: as profits have reached record highs along with stock market highs, the wages of most workers have continued to stagnate in the 2000s though there have been inflation-adjusted gains in the last two years (Bivens et al. 2014; Gould 2017).
In this report, we examine trends in CEO compensation, using the two measures described above, to determine how CEOs are faring compared with typical workers (through 2016) and compared with their top 0.1 percent peers (through 2015). We also look at the relationship between growth in CEO pay and stock market and profit growth. We find that:
Using the stock-options-realized measure, the average CEO compensation for CEOs in the 350 largest U.S. firms was $15.6 million in 2016. Compensation in 2016 (data available through May) is down 4.3 percent (from $16.3 million) since 2015 but up 45.6 percent (from $10.7 million) since the recovery began in 2009. The fall in average compensation reflected a loss for the highest-paid CEOs while those in the bottom 80 percent earned more in 2016 than in 2015.
Using the stock-options-granted measure, the average CEO compensation for CEOs in the 350 largest U.S. firms was $13.0 million in 2016, up 3.8 percent from $12.5 million in 2015.
From 1978 to 2016, inflation-adjusted compensation, based on realized stock options, of the top CEOs increased 937 percent, a rise more than 70 percent greater than stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 11.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period. CEO compensation, when measured using the value of stock options granted, grew more slowly from 1978 to 2016, rising 807 percent—a still-substantial increase relative to every benchmark available.
Using the stock-options-realized measure, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965, peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000, and was 271-to-1 in 2016—down from 286-to-1 in 2015 but still far higher than at any point in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Using the stock-options-granted measure, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio rose to 224-to-1 in 2016 (from 220-to-1 in 2015), significantly down from its peak of 411-to-1 in 2000 but still much higher than the 54-to-1 ratio of 1989 or the 18-to-1 ratio of 1965.
In examining the compensation of the top CEOs relative to that of other very-high-wage earners (in the top 0.1 percent), we find that:
Over the last three decades, compensation, using realized stock options, for CEOs grew far faster than that of other highly paid workers, i.e., those earning more than 99.9 percent of wage earners. CEO compensation in 2015 (the latest year for data on top wage earners) was 5.33 times greater than wages of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, a ratio 2.15 points higher than the 3.18 ratio that prevailed over the 1947–1979 period. This wage gain alone is equivalent to the wages of more than two very-high-wage earners.
The fact that CEO pay has grown far faster than the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners indicates that CEO compensation growth does not simply reflect the increased value of highly paid professionals in a competitive race for skills (the “market for talent”), but rather reflects the presence of substantial “economic rents” embedded in executive pay (meaning that CEO pay does not reflect greater productivity of executives but rather the power of CEOs to extract concessions). Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment.
Also over the last three decades, CEO compensation increased more relative to the pay of other very-high-wage earners than the wages of college graduates rose relative to the wages of high school graduates. This indicates that the escalation of CEO pay does not simply reflect a more general rise in the returns to education.
Critics of these analyses suggest looking at the pay of the average CEO, not just CEOs of the largest firms. However, the average firm is very small, employing just 20 workers, and does not represent a useful comparison to the pay of a typical worker, defined here as an employee of a firm with roughly 1,000 workers. Workers in small firms are atypical: half (51.6 percent) of employment and 58.1 percent of total payroll (wages multiplied by employment) are in firms with 500 or more employees, and firms with at least 10,000 workers account for 27.9 percent of all employment and 31.4 percent of all payroll.
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Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
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Dec 30, 2017 - 11:14am PT
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Congratulations, you can copy and paste.
How many employees does each of those companies have and what is their revenue and operating cash flow?
Since you think their CEO pay is "too high", what should it be for each?
Since they should hire more employees instead, what should each do, and how would they add value to the company?
If the company reduced CEO pay by X, what are other uses of the money?
I'd love to hear your analysis for each company based on relevant facts for each.
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chipper_shredder
Social climber
outinthecuts
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 30, 2017 - 11:31am PT
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Dec 30, 2017 - 11:46am PT
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Un-lockedgait... Were they paying OT for the donkeys during the immaculate conception..?
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