If I had to choose among having the country owned by the tea party, the OWS protestors, and the rich... I think I'd go for the rich. Least of 3 evils. t least they've a clue how it works.

Quote Originally Posted by motorfirebox View Post
I don't think the money saved from reducing executive pay is the point. The point is to realign pay with output. An executive who runs his corporation into the ground and costs hundreds of thousands of jobs should not get a bonus. Reducing the pay of an executive who fails that badly is not a goal in and of itself, it's a means to disincentivize that sort of failure and to incentivize, or reincentivize, success.
An executive that cost hundreds of thousands of jobs? Where do you find one of those.

Who do you want to do the realigning? The government? We're talking about a miniscule minority of corporations anyway, so your overall impact on the economy is likely to be close to zero. Of course if you buy into the nonsense that "the banks" caused the crisis, it might look like there's sense in it... but lots of things look sensible if you buy into nonsense. They just don't seem to work out sensibly in practice.

Hasn't it ever struck you how eager politicians are to ride a bubble, cultivate it, urge its expansion, take credit for the pleasures of the upside... think of the Clintonites boasting of their balanced budget, the low unemployment, the soaring stock market, or the Bushies and their record home ownership rates... then when the bubble bursts it's all somebody else's fault? Doesn't that tell you something?