What Good For CEOs ...
by digby
"I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” President Obama told 20 CEOs this morning, according to a source in the room. “We want to be boosters because when you do well, America does well."
Really?Wall Street banks are on pace to pay out some $143 billion in compensation for 2010, just shy of their record year of 2007. But given the widespread layoffs of mid-level employees as a result of the financial crisis, average compensation set a record. At the top six banks, compensation rose 10 percent over 2007.
That's just the banks of course. Here's the data for CEOs generally:
Chief executives at the nation’s largest corporations received $9.25 million in average total compensation in 2009, according to the AFL-CIO’s analysis of available pay data from 292 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. Although average total compensation for these CEOs declined 9 percent from the previous year, executive retirement benefits increased 23 percent.
Not that anyone cares, but here's how it's been going for the rest of us:
¶The typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.
¶To me, that’s the big news from the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance, which was released this morning. Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
¶In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.
That was from 2009. The median wage actually went down again this year.
Like the rest of the political establishment the President thinks that the health of the economy must be left in the hands of these "savvy businessmen" and that they are so all powerful that they cannot even have their feelings hurt lest they decide to destroy the country in a fit of pique.
But he is wrong when he says that what's good for CEOs is good for the USA. (It is, however, good for politicians.)
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