Re: BBB
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:When you have corporations making such huge profits, what does it tell you? Obviously, they are over charging for their services and products beyond reasonable profits. With enough surplus profit to afford those huge CEO bonuses and salaries, they could reinvest in their companies to improve their services and products---and the US economy. Do they do that?
Noooo! Instead, they demonstrate greed! GREED! GREED!
BBB
Exactly BBB, you put it very well!
Of course Henry Ford was only considering his profits. He admitted that he did not offer such high wages because he was a great humanitarian. He said humanitarianism had nothing to do with it. Previously profit had been based on paying wages as low as workers would take and pricing cars as high as the traffic would bear. Ford, on the other hand, stressed low pricing (the Model T cost $950 in 1908 and $290 in 1927) in order to capture the widest possible market and then met the price by volume and efficiency.
Comments like "greedy" are a bit unfair. The mistake we make is to look at the earnings of corporate executives in an absolute sense, rather than looking them with a overall perespctive, relative to the amount of money the company is making.
We should also take into consideration that when a company does well, the common man also benefits - it might not be very apparent at first, but remember, institutional investors, like pension funds and all, invest heavily in large corporations stocks. When the stock does well, these funds make more money thus ensuring that things like pensions are not jepordized.
In this market, consumer is the king - if you feel that a comany is making money unfairly out of you, you have full right to shift yr business to another company which you feel gives you more bang for yr buck.
Re film stars, well, it is a simple case of supply and demand. Some of you wont pay $14 a ticket to watch a movie, but believe me, the people who ARE willing to pay this amount far outnumbers people who are not.
I don't think looking at it in the relative sense is reasonable. If a company makes THAT much money, than give it to the stockholders or up their charitable contributions. The amount of money that some of these top execs make is obscene. There is no other way to describe it.
As for those who are willing to pay the $$'s for movies, eventually it will reach a point where people will not pay if things continue as they are. You know what makes me angry are those ads against movie piracy where they have film crew workers and other average wage earners in the film industry saying that the money lost on piracy means lost money for them. What a load of horse $hit! It's the production companies and producers who aren't getting as big a piece of the pie as they feel they "deserve".
The crew has been paid before the movie even hits the theatres.
Gautam wrote:
We should also take into consideration that when a company does well, the common man also benefits
That's called trickle down economics, the supposition that when the wealthy are making money, the benefits trickle to those below. It's also crap. Wealthy people these days are so greedy that they don't let go of anything. I've been hearing about the "distribution of wealth" my entire life. And yet the wealthiest 10% still own more than the other 90% combined, and they've got every intention of keeping it that way.
Charity ? How do you know that Citigroup does not contribute to charity, or for that matter it's chef executive does not ?
Let's look at some facts here
Sandy Weil has made contributions worth over $200 million dollors to charities personally, in addition to corporate charities on 10s of millions made by the company itself.
Distributing the money to shareholders does not make sense either. I am not sure of the exact number of Citigroup shares floating around, but even by conservation estimates, if number of shares were say 2 billion, then distributing $43 million amongst them would have resulted in an increase of 0.002 cents per share. To make a difference of a $1000 you would have had to hold 500,000 shares worth $25million, and lets be honest here - someone who has $25,000,000 of stock, would not be too worried abt $1000 here and there.
And Wilso, trickle down economy is a reaility, however it is not so simple as you make it out to be. How do you reckon pension funds get money to pay the pensions ???
As I said, it is wrong to look at these numbers in the absolute sense. Don't be so blinded in yr condemnation that you refuse to see the logic.
I disagree.
Who pays for these huge profits? The consumer. We are all paying more in almost everything we use or do. I think when companies make these types of profits to the extent that they can hand out multi-million dollar bonuses to their top execs really says something as to how they are overprofitting, in my opinion. And banks are the worst. The only thing my bank ever did for me was provide a relatively safe place to keep my money. And they charged me for that "privilege". That's why I left the bank in favour of a credit union.
But getting back to the point of these bonuses, I'm sorry but it is sorely out of whack with what they do. Consider some of the top surgeons and researchers in the world whose contribution and time and effort will, I guarantee you, exceed those of any of these execs. They won't make in a lifetime what these execs get as a bonus in one year. That is out of sync with how it should be. As Wilso said, no one, no matter what they do, is worth that kind of money. You can say it's based on the company's profits, but that doesn't make it right. It's a skewed justification in my opinion.
No one person contributes that much to the profits of a company. It's arrogance in the extreme.
As I said before - consumer is the king ! if you feel that you are not getting bang for yr buck, then the consumer is free to take its business elsewhere!
Wilso, how can you say with so much surety that no one person contributes that much to the profits of the company ? if you have an idea of the sheer size of the deals which these people bring in due to their connections/contacts/influence you would be amazed !
