Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
What can be done to deter pharmaceutical companies from jacking up prices of critical drugs? To prevent Wall Street banks from excessive gambling? To nudge CEOs into taking a longer-term view? To restrain runaway CEO pay?
Answer to all four: Fulfill Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign pledge.
When he ran for president, Bill Clinton said he’d bar companies from deducting executive pay above $1 million. Once elected, he asked his economic advisors (among them, yours truly) to put the measure into his first budget.
My colleagues weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the new president’s campaign promise. “Maybe there’s some way we can do this without actually limiting executive pay,” one said.
“Look, we’re not limiting executive pay,” I argued. “Companies could still pay their executives whatever they wanted to pay them. We’re just saying society shouldn’t subsidize through the tax code any pay over a million bucks.”
They weren’t convinced.
“Why not require that pay over a million dollars be linked to company performance?” said another. “Executives have to receive it in shares of stock or stock options, that sort of thing. If no linkage, no deduction.”
“Good idea,” a third chimed in. “It’s consistent with what the President promised, and it won’t create flak in the business community.”
“But,” I objected, “we’re not just talking about shareholders. The pay gap is widening in this country, and it affects everybody.”
“Look, Bob,” said the first one. “We shouldn’t do social engineering through the tax code And there’s no reason to declare class warfare. I think we’ve arrived at a good compromise. I propose that we recommend it to the President.”
The vote was four to one. The measure became section 162(m) of the IRS tax code. It was supposed to cap executive pay. But it just shifted executive pay from salaries to stock options.
After that, not surprisingly, stock options soared – becoming by far the largest portion of CEO pay.
When Bill Clinton first proposed his plan, compensation for CEOs at America’s 350 largest corporations averaged $4.9 million. By the end of the Clinton administration, it had ballooned to $20.3 million. Since then, it’s gone into the stratosphere.
And because corporations can deduct all this from their corporate income taxes, you and I and other taxpayers have been subsidizing this growing bonanza.
Hillary Clinton understands this. “When you see that you’ve got CEO’s making 300 times what the average worker’s making you know the deck is stacked in favor of those at the top,” she’s said in her presidential campaign.
And she’s taken direct aim at executive stock options.
“Many stock-heavy pay packages have created a perverse incentive for executives to seek the big payouts that could come from a temporary rise in share price,” she said in July. “And we ended up encouraging some of the same short-term thinking we meant to discourage.”
Yes, we did. Specifically, her husband and his economic team did.
Case in point: In 2014, pharmaceutical company Mylan put in place a one-time stock grant worth as much as $82 million to the company’s top five executives if Mylan’s earnings and stock price met certain goals by the end of 2018.
But the executives would get nothing if the company – whose star product is the EpiPen allergy treatment – failed to meet the target. Almost immediately, Mylan began stepping up the pace of EpiPen price increases. The price of an EpiPen two-back doubled to $600 – a move Hillary Clinton has rightfully called “outrageous.”
Stock options doled out to Wall Street executives in the early 2000s didn’t exactly encourage good behavior, either. They contributed to the near meltdown of the Street and a taxpayer-funded bailout.
Now that Wall Street is no longer restrained by the terms of the bailout, it’s back issuing stock options with a vengeance.
According to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, the top 20 banks paid their executives over $2 billion in performance bonuses between 2012 and 2015. That translates into a taxpayer subsidy of $1.7 million per executive per year.
Hillary Clinton has proposed penalizing pharmaceutical companies like Mylan that suddenly jack up the prices of crucial drugs. And she’s promised to go after big banks that make excessively risky bets.
These are useful steps. But she should also consider a more basic measure, which would better align executive incentives with what’s good for the public.
It’s doing what her husband pledged to do in 1992, if elected president – but which his economic advisors then sabotaged: Bar corporations from deducting all executive pay in excess of $1 million. Period.
“
Judicial Watch, an organization that has been pursuing Clinton for many years, has released a trove of emails it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, emails that supposedly show how donors to the Clinton Foundation got special access, and presumably special favors, from Clinton while she was at State.
The only problem is that the emails in question reveal nothing of the sort. What they actually reveal is that a few foundation donors wanted access, but didn’t actually get it.
Let’s look at that story. It mentions three specific requests sent to Clinton aide Huma Abedin by Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, on behalf of people who had contributed to the Foundation:
* A sports executive who had donated to the foundation wanted to arrange for a visa for a British soccer player to visit the United States; he was having trouble getting one because of a criminal conviction. Abedin said she’d look into it, but there’s no evidence she did anything and the player didn’t get his visa.
* Bono, who had donated to the foundation, wanted to have some kind of arrangement whereby upcoming U2 concerts would be broadcast to the International Space Station. Abedin was puzzled by this request, and nothing was ever done about it.
* The Crown Prince of Bahrain, who had donated to the foundation, wanted to meet with Clinton on a visit to Washington. Abedin responded to Band that the Bahrainis had already made that request through normal diplomatic channels. The two did end up meeting.
And that’s it. If there were anything more scandalous there, have no doubt that Judicial Watch would have brought it to reporters’ eager attention.
Just to highlight this, because it’s important: If there were anything more scandalous there, have no doubt that Judicial Watch would have brought it to reporters’ eager attention.
There’s just nothing here, and everyone knows it. However, Judicial Watch and its allies will do everything they can to create the appearance of something being wrong, so that the Breitbarts and Drudge Reports and other Stupidsphere “news” sources can “just ask questions” that feed into the narrative that the Stupidshpere so desperately needs to believe.
These stories aren’t intended to sway anyone. These stories are meant to reassure the base of the Stupidsphere, and force journalists to waste time and resources debunking them.
Of course you don’t. Free college might hinder the school-to-prison pipeline your prison owning donors depend on
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welp;
Actual quote, in context:
“I believe that we should make community college free. We should have debt-free college if you got to a public college or university. You should not have to borrow a dime to pay tuition… I disagree with free college for everybody. I don’t think taxpayers should be paying to send Donald Trump’s kids to college.“ [video link]
Don’t spread misinformation just to fit a narrative, Clinton is advocating for there to be a cap on who gets free college so that the government doesn’t have to subsidize the education of people with enough disposable income to pay for it themselves. The plan she’s proposing would have a better chance of being passed, is more cost-effective, and still opens up higher education to low-income individuals who previously couldn’t afford it.
As someone who makes his living wading through political bullshit, I harbored suspicions and dislike for Clinton based on rumor, innuendo, and the framing of the conversation. I’m not sure exactly when I realized I got it wrong, but the more research I do into her background and record, the clearer it becomes that sexism clouded my perception.
I evaluated Clinton by standards I did not hold her male colleagues to.
This is an INCREDIBLY thorough and well-sourced chronicle of the sexism Hillary Clinton has faced through her entire public life, with a personal narrative of working to overcome culturally-ingrained sexism I think we can all relate to.
The game’s creators have launched a fundraiser, America Votes With Cards Against Humanity, where they’re letting their customers decide which of the two campaigns should received the donations the company collects.
“Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” the project’s website reads. “At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
incredible
holy shit
“Hillary Clinton has certainly lived the impact of these stereotypes about women and power. Her likability, or lack thereof, is a regular topic of discussion and concern. She was too liberal before she was too conservative; she’s too loud when she speaks, but she’s also too boring; she was too moralistic, and now she’s too cynical. As long as she’s running for office, it seems there’s no ‘just right’ for voters’ perceptions of Clinton. And once she actually holds office, she’s low-key, a collaborator and supporter of others, rarely quick to claim credit – which is perhaps why, despite being a hugely effective senator and a Secretary of State who handled important work quietly, she doesn’t often get the same recognition as her male peers. ‘I’m the girl who did the whole lab project and organized the whole group presentation,’ wrote Alexandra Petri in a Washington Post piece humorously describing what Real Talk speech from Hillary would sound like. ‘And then let Chad give the speech.’”
srsly, i don’t know if younger voters really appreciate how much she was demonized for being an emasculating leftist harpy before she was rebranded as a corporate lackey
Jill Stein is an antivaxxer and Johnson wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade …but sure keep telling me how viable they are after you googled ‘third party candidate’ for .7 seconds on your phone. Go to bed.
Also she compared autism to cancer so…
I looked this up, and it’s true. Disgusting. Jill Stein said that autism is an “epidemic” and compared it to cancer, diabetes, asthma, and obesity. Fuck that. Do not vote for someone towing the Autism $peaks party line!
For those who’re hewing to the fiscal side of the election more than the social:
“This
morning, Moody’s Analytics released a report concluding that Clinton’s
economic plan would create 3.2 million jobs and accelerate growth of the
nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). By contrast, earlier this month,
a similar (albeit contested) Moody’s analysis of Trump’s economic plan
estimated that it would reduce employment (by about 3.5 million jobs),
reduce economic output, and prompt a painful recession.”
