Bernie Sanders Aims to Slash CEO Pay Yet Again, Igniting Controversy

When the housing bubble burst in 2008, the media made a big deal about the bonuses that some bank CEOs received. I happened to work in the Los Angeles region at the time. One Friday night, while I was enjoying a few beers after dinner, I struck up an interesting conversation with a man who was working for one of these banks. I asked what he thought about the bonus packages the legacy media had been yapping about. I have always remembered his response.

He said, “Well, here’s the thing. Many of these guys’ bonuses are based on their performance. And it can work this way: A candidate meets the Board of Directors and they tell him, “We’re in trouble. We expect the bank to lose $100,000,000 in the next 12 months.” “I’m confident I can limit the losses to 40 million,” the candidate tells the Board after reviewing the data. The candidate is hired and his bonus is based on how well he keeps the losses under the dreaded 100 million dollar mark. ”

It’s not just the private sector that is guilty of double-dipping. The academic world is also notorious for it.

I’m not sure how many executive compensation packages were structured in this way during that crisis, but I know that a lot are based on the performance of the executives. There is a senator who doesn’t care about this and has been trying to reduce corporate compensation since he was honeymooning in the Soviet Union. This is Senator Bernie Sanders, (I-VT), the old Bolshevik Vermonter. He’s doing it again.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, along with a group of Democratic legislators, are pushing for a tax increase on companies that pay their CEOs at least 50 times more than the average worker’s salary. They say that this is necessary to curb corporate greed.

In a Monday statement, senators stated that the union-backed proposal could have a significant impact on some of the largest companies in the country. It would also require Treasury Department guidance to prevent companies from avoiding taxation by hiring contractors instead of employees.

The bill would generate $150 billion over 10 years in U.S. revenues. Companies could avoid a tax hike by increasing worker salaries and reducing CEO salaries, the experts said.

This guy is a socialist who thinks the Soviet Union was doing pretty well.

It’s funny that a large part of the corporate world in America agrees with him.

Bernie Sanders’ proposals will only add to the movement of corporate headquarters from one tax-friendly area to another.

Congress does not have the authority to regulate compensation for corporations unless we were unaware that the 10th Amendment had been repealed.

This is how it works.

According to the proposed legislation, the measure would increase the tax rate for companies with a CEO-to-worker ratio above 50:1. The increase begins at 0.5 percentage points when the executive earns 50 to 100 percent more than the average employee of the company.

No one in Washington has demonstrated this better than Bernie Sanders.