• CayenneMan said on Oct 11, 2008....

    You best get yo mind right boy . . . this idea stinks to high heaven !   You be talk'in to me dat way ?  I'm Oprah and yo idea sucks !  I be next in line !

    All kidding aside, I agree with you. Good post lfbno7.

      

• lfbno7 said on Oct 11, 2008....

  yes oprah would be in a bit of trouble here. she'd be pretty high on the list of people who would suffer from the salary cap. i don't know what she makes, but isn't she up around 50 or 100 million a year? could it be? damn, i could live on half that.

• beyondtheveil said on Oct 11, 2008....

  7- I don't usually have many reasons to come on here and disagree with you, mainly because I understand in general what you are talking about and you rant a lot. That's good, I enjoy them. But a national salary cap which would have to be imposed by the govt. to make it work doesn't ring true to me.
  
  Oprah for instance, or movie stars that bring in 15 million plus per movie. People like this bring in those salaries because they bring huge amounts to the networks or corporations they work for. If Oprah didn't get her salary, someone else one way or another would get it in her place and wouldn't deserve it.
  
  What I would go for is eliminating payouts that were not salary. "Parachutes" and "owing" people after they leave are a load of crap. In my city we had a CEO of a utility who made horrible decisions running the company and bought into investments they had no idea how to run and they bled the company.
  
  He was removed for his actions but received a huge chunk of money and was retained for years at a large monthly salary as a "consultant". Just what we needed. Its stories like this and others around the nation that make all big earnings (I use the word lightly) look bad.
  
  Oprah's pay may sound sinful to a lot of people, but she generates the revenue and deserves to swim in her coins.
  
  I would never have capped Bill Gates' wealth for building Microsoft. No one is worth sixty billion, but it is his, you know. If you cap people like this and many others, it leaves us open for stunting growth and creativity.
  

• lfbno7 said on Oct 11, 2008....

  I'll choose you for it. I got evens. Best of three takes it. How many fingers did you put out?

• D6fer said on Oct 11, 2008....

  communism is never the answer......how about eliminating conflict of interest by not allowing corporate executives to hold stocks in that company? Or possibly capping that?

• seer said on Oct 11, 2008....

  A marvelous but already considered idea. A slightly left wing one, which is why I like it.

  HBOS top man took almost a 3 million bonus on top of his salary, whereas the people who trusted him with their savings lost big style.

  Still, makes me laugh the way people protest a taxpayer's money bail out of the banks - they fucked us over now we're willing to let them all sink risking financial and social anarchy because we hate them so much, but we're willing to send £30 a month to some starving kid in bongo-bongo land so he dosn't die of malaria.

  Oh, this idea was discussed by British politicians already, but the people that rape their companies and the public tend to be very rich, and make generous donations to political parties, often in hundreds of thousands (or in Labour's preferred currancy 'peerages'), so the politicians can't exactly cap their salaries cause they'd loose all their funding. A political party's funds must be gotten through 'charity', so donations from rich bastards ETC NOT from taxpayers, so unfortunately a much-needed (and well funny) salary cap can't happen.

• curmudgeon said on Oct 11, 2008....

  So should there be a salary cap for baseball players, actors, musicians and so on, too? What's the formula here?

• RollingC said on Oct 11, 2008....

  If there's a salary cap...why not go all the way and start passing laws that are for positive social-economic growth across the board ?
  I mean....there's a lot of injustice going on and due to economic profit policies from large companies I believe inflation is much larger than what it should be.
   
  Start capping the profit margin...at a healthy margin of course but capping it anyway.  That would automatically cap the ridiculously large bonuses that some companies....including government agencies like the school board here in Dade-County is giving to their higher-ups in management. 
  Even if they get fired... they still get huge amounts in bonuses while the lowly run-of-the-mill teachers get their vacations and/or benefits cut off and many may get laid off in order to stay within the budget.
   
  There should also be laws that punish those that keep new inventions from hitting the market.  There are inventions out there that would solve the oil dependancy in a matter of months....not years.  But the hype is so big that people buy into the scam.  The ones that would be hurt in the pocket book would be the big car companies and oil companies.  
   
  They already know how to get almost (if not more) a 100miles to the galon of gasoline and I'm talking about the big car companies.
  There is already technology out there...and available....to turn your car into a hybrid and burn water with gas or just water....and get plenty of more miles to the galon doing it.
   
  My goal...(one of them)....for next year is to save enough money so I can do just that with my car.
   
  Rc

• lfbno7 said on Oct 11, 2008....

  D6, not sure what your definition of communism is, but when the public is called upon to shell out tons of money to save some failed banks, that isn't what I'd call capitalist. We already are a communist country. We bail out the wealthy and we give Welfare to the poor. Those things fit My definition of communism, but perhaps not yours, so it may just be a semantic difference here. Communism is an easy word to throw around, symbolizing everything wrong with the world, but what is Welfare, what is Social Security, what is this bailout, what is the public school system? They are all communist, far as I can see. So is the American family. I don't see teenage kids working a hell of a lot to support themselves. There's a bit of communism in there. Anyway, I'd be in favor of something that reeled in the filthy rich and gave a decent break to the working people, and that doesn't make me a commie, it makes me a person who believes in fairness and knows that the filthy rich are a bunch of selfish greedy people who don't "deserve" their billions and need to be supervised.
  
  Seer, I remember a song by the Beatles called Taxman. There's one for you, nineteen for me. That song gave me the impression that when you are at the highest tax bracket in jolly old England they tax you at a pretty high rate.
  
  Curmudgeon, if we don't put our salary cap at 100 million a year, but at something paltry like 10 million a year (a little Alpo goes a long way to making it possible to live on 10 million a year) then it would affect athletes and other celebrities. I'd like that. It would lower our tv bill each month, not having to pay Alex Rodriguez's salary. I'd rather have the extra money in our checking accounts, not in A-Rod's. He has enough.
  
  Rolling, I'd like to expand on the idea of a salary cap too, and do other worthwhile things. Anything that reels in the filthy rich and gives a fair break to the working people is great with me. I have zero sympathy for the filthy rich. They have enough. We struggle. They don't deserve the insane amounts that they have. Maybe Paris Hilton can wash a dish once in a while.

• D6fer said on Oct 12, 2008....

  lfbno7.......I agree....somewhat.....there are some true conservatives out there that would like to see many of those communist programs revoked.....right now its hard to tell who we can trust.....unfortunately it looks like GWB was serious about a global economy.....and the dems are going to more than welcome this socialism,,,,despite what they say.
  
  Question......how exactly would they distribute all of this money? How do you decide how much everyone gets?
  If you start doling out money to the poor to do nothing, then the "next to poor" will not have any incentive to work either.......sounds like a good way to put an end to productivity to me.
  

• RollingC said on Oct 12, 2008....

  How about buying all the bad loans the market wants to dump then putting a very low fixed interest on the house or property you own in accordance with the money you're making ?
  That would insure the government that they'll make their money back in the long run and nobody has to be buried under a mortgage they can't afford to pay.  As long as it can be proven that they will make a profit (in the long run) that would make the property viable for re-selling later and getting their cash back if not more.
  Rc

• lfbno7 said on Oct 13, 2008....

  About the bailout, I don't really have a handle on it. I just would prefer to see working people get government consideration rather than seeing multi millionaires get taxpayer money for screwing up. My biggest complaint about America is that the people who fund political campaigns, the mega-rich, have purchased the government of the United States and use it for their own purposes. It's not that I'm into "class war" so much as that I recognize that the mega-rich have already been engaged in a class war against all of us for many years and I'm sick of getting shitted on by them. The bailout is a prime example of all of us getting shitted on by them and I note that the Democratic party is just fine with it and voted it into law, not to exclude the Republican party which did the same.

• RollingC said on Oct 13, 2008....

  Everyone has their good points and bad points....and of course that goes for presidents also.   Of all the presidents this country has had...and it's had quite a few that were above the norm and that correctly deserve the venerance they get.... there has been only one in recent years that did something economically that shows that he was really looking after the masses rather than just a selected group of the rich and powerful. 
  Clinton....in spite of all the criticism he gets (and well deserved also) he made the government balance it's own budget and.....surprise !....... there was a big surplus left over with which he intended to fix social security but never got a chance to with the Republicans coming into power.
  That's not saying that they're all bad...it's not easy being a politician otherwise we would all be trying to run for some office or other....but the Republican's version of   " trickle down economics " is not my idea of giving a fair shake to everyone like a good democracy should be doing.
   
  Rc

• lfbno7 said on Oct 13, 2008....

  Those sound like some good points. Republicans never care about balancing the budget or giving a fair deal to working people. Au contraire. They prefer to have our country deeply in debt so they can have the pleasure of saying there is no money in the budget to give the working people anything at all for the huge tax withholdings they have taken out of our paychecks. We give give give and we don't get back. Nice system. For somebody. I call it robbery.
  
  But I don't give Clinton a clean bill of health. It was his administration that ushered in globalization, which in English means making it much more profitable for a company to fire all its American workers and replace them with people in other lands who work dirt cheap. That only benefits the already wealthy business owner who is so self centered that he couldn't care less if any other Americans drop dead. He knows who Number One is - it's him and him alone. His motto is America Be Damned, I'm going to maximize my own damn profits.

• curmudgeon said on Oct 13, 2008....

  Globalization is inevitable. Our technologies are going to make us interdependent, period. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. People who have been shut out of oportunities to develop and prosper within their own countries (rather that emigrate en masse) will eventually get a shot.
   
  As to a profit cap or a salary cap for A-Rod - neither of these will lower your bills.
   
  You lower your bills in the programming choices you make. You don't have to watch A-Rod at home. You could go watch him at a bar, listen to his games on the radio for free, or read about him in the paper. You could save your cable money and go see him live. Capping A-Rod's salary wouldn't even raise the salaries of the lower-paid players. The Yanks would simply run their business some other way. I agree that a baseball player making that kind of scratch seems outrageous, but I don't see how capping the guys on top will help the situation.
   
  Look at it this way - if a company does business in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year, has tens of thousands of employees, provides some benefit to millions of customers, paying these guys absurd amounts of money just seems wrong but as a percentage of the company's business it's not really all that much.
   
  If a company's profit is capped at 4%, then once it gets good at what it does, it will make 4%. It won't invest in growth or efficiency or develop new technologies - why should it if all it's going to make is 4%? Savings won't even be passed on to customers, because the company will save nothing.
   
  Now I wouldn't mind figuring out a way of getting companies to prioritize bonuses (or automatic salary increases) from profits to the lowest paid employees. Something along a sliding scale where the lowest paid get the biggest share of the bonus, with people on top getting the smallest.
   
  If what we want is for companies to cough up more dough to Uncle Sam, tax gross receipts instead of profits and get rid of subsidies and business loss deductions.
   
  Either that or I would is abolish the practice of giving bonuses to CEOs and top management altogether. See, you can cap a CEO's salary and she'd still cut a deal for performance bonuses or exit fees. Then all she has to do is order the underlings to cook the books and parachute away when the whole thing falls apart. Flat fee for service, period. No golden parachutes, stock options, signing bonus, nothing. Just a nice healthy paycheck. If the next crop of managers doesn't like that, let them flip burgers.
   

• lfbno7 said on Oct 13, 2008....

  Whatever gives the working man more of what he has worked for, and reels in the filthy rich man, is fine with me. That's the bottom line. We've been going in the opposite direction for the last 10 years or so. The rich and powerful are in a position to indulge their selfishness at the expense of us all, and they are doing so with help from Uncle Sam, who is their tool, and who is in fact one of them.

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