we talk about minimum wage and the senators and rep's giving themselves

another raise, the energy company's making unhealthy profits. My question is should we have a cap on wages and profits a company can make. Energy is something we all need as are housing and food, so should there be limits as to what can be made.:shrug:

foxes are guarding the chickencoop.

just trying to put together what it is I want to do when I am made king,
just kidding. :rofl:

wage caps were used under the Johnson administration. To offset the wage caps - companies started offering things like health insurance in order to attract and retain employees

but in answer to your question - no I don't think there should be caps - but there should be serious oversight of companies that are making obscene profits if nothing more than to investigate price gouging/collusion or other dirty dealings.

as far as minimum wage goes - it should be tied to something like inflation or some other economic indicator so that it automatically gets raised when "x" hits "y" points

the republican argument that raising the minimum wage will hurt small businesses is stupid. yeah, it will mean small businesses will have a larger payroll, but the offset is that their employees will be in a better financial position to spend money. :smirk: it will "trickle up"

Henry Ford was criticized for paying his employees far above the going rate. he told his detractors that he wanted his employees to be able to afford the product they were making.

trickle down operates on the assumption that if you stuff the shelves with products the public will buy it. This will lead to profits for companies, who will be able to make even more products.

However, if the public doesn't have money - they aren't going to be able to buy no matter how stuffed the shelves.

I don't think we have a problem with profits that end up going to the shareholders but compensation of CEOs, and of other senior management, is just plain ridiculous. It would be ineffective to just treat the symptoms by limiting current forms of compensation such as stock options grants. The reason is that the CEOs and BODs are very creative, and would just come up with other forms of skimming the cream off the top of corporate profits.

The disease is that BODs emphasize with CEOs and are not primarily shareholder proponents as they are supposed to be. This is because BOD members are often CEOs themselves, and are often actually selected by the CEO at the company where they are board members. This is made worse by interlocking BODs, where CEOs serve on boards at each others' companies.

I don't have an overall solution but I know exactly where to start: CEOs are paid enough so that their jobs should be considered full time. They should all be prohibited from working anywhere else - even for no pay - while they are CEOs. This particularly applies to serving on BODs. No, serving on the BOD of a nonprofit is not OK. And no, serving on the BOD of the same company where the CEO is employed is not OK.

Prohibition of these incestuous relationships would go a long way toward curtailing the currently obscene and unjustified levels of executive compensation.

Some of the most profitable companies in terms of total profit- like ExxonMobil - have far smaller profit margins than companies in the pharmaceutical industry, or in high tech industries (like Microsoft).

So, if you cap profits over a certain dollar amount, you are not capping profits some of the most profitable companies.

Or, if you tax profits over a certain margin, you risk having companies "fix" their accounting to ensure their profits are not too high.

they should not have the power to raise their salaries any time they want to. they make the laws. they pass the laws. the line their pockets with OUR money.

wage earners get one and not one second before.

:)