The Pay's the Thing: How America's CEOs Are Getting Rich Off Taxpayers

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http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/23137-the-pays-the-thing-how-americas-ceos-are-getting-rich-off-taxpayers



It’s proxy season again, and we will soon be deluged with news profiles of CEOs living in high style as our ongoing debate on CEO pay ramps up. Last week, the floodgates opened when the New York Times released its annual survey of the 100 top-earning CEOs. Lawrence Ellison from Oracle Corporation led the list again with over $78 million in mostly stock options and valued perks, an 18 percent drop in pay from last year. Poor Larry.

Rising CEO pay has been a hugely contested issue in the U.S. since the early 20th century, particularly in the midst of economic downturns and rising inequality (these two often go together). Because the numbers are just so staggering, most of the current debate focuses on the rapid rise in CEO pay over the past four decades. While executive pay remained below $1 million (in 2000 dollars) between 1940 and 1970, since 1978 it has risen 725 percent, more than 127 times faster than worker compensation over the same period.

With any luck, ascendant French economist Thomas Piketty and the English-language release of his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century will build much-needed momentum in D.C. to institute reforms that address our CEO pay problem. This is a major driver of America’s rising income inequality, which is the central focus of Piketty’s magnum opus. One reform in particular that is critical to slowing down the growth of CEO pay and its costly impact on our economy is closing the performance pay tax loophole.

Inspired by compensation guru Graef Crystal’s bestseller on corporate excesses and skyrocketing executive pay, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton elevated CEO pay as a core issue of his 1992 campaign with a pledge to eliminate corporate tax deductions for executive pay that topped $1 million. Clinton was successful only in part; his policy did become part of the U.S. tax code as Section 162(m), but it came with a few unfortunate qualifiers, namely the exception for pay that rewarded targeted performance goals, or “performance pay.”