The Executive Pay Bubble: A Fresh New Progressive Appraisal

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



The Executive Pay Bubble:
A New Progressive Appraisal
Top execs in high finance, says the Institute for Policy Studies, have turned hard times — for the American people — into a springboard for still another round of unconscionably huge personal pay windfalls.

September 2, 2009
By Sam Pizzigati


Researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C., have been publishing an annual report on executive pay ever since 1994. The latest edition of this Executive Excess series has just appeared. The report's verdict? On executive pay, over the last year, nothing has changed — and everything has changed.

The “nothing” surfaces first in Executive Excess 2009. Top U.S. corporate executives, the IPS study documents, are still making hundreds of times more than average U.S. workers, just as they have since the mid 1990s.

To be exact: In 2008, top execs took home 319 times the average U.S. annual worker wage. Three decades ago, before executive pay started skyrocketing, top execs seldom took home more than 30 times average worker pay.

Executive pay, in short, remains painfully excessive. That much hasn’t changed — at all. What has changed? This year, for the first time ever, most Americans now seem to understand the pain — and danger — that excessive executive pay invariably produces.

Credit that understanding to the global economic meltdown that erupted last September. Super-sized rewards for executives, the new IPS report notes, created the incentives for the executive “recklessness that brought the United States — and the world — to the brink of economic cataclysm.” And most Americans know it, from the President on down. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/sept7a.html