Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said last month that he might try to extend to ALL U.S. companies a restriction that prohibits bailout banks from taking a tax deduction of more than $500,000 in pay for each executive.
Sorry about going off topic but this made me cringe after I realized what I was reading.
I refused to accept the truth in that quote thinking maybe it was a typo.
I'm not talking about the proposed idea by Geithner to extend that restriction to all companies.
I'm saying I was a little bit shocked to see there was a law in place for claiming a tax deduction
for top 5 executives' compensation over 1,000,000.
Then, after reading that companies were able to deduct all compensation until Clinton changed it,
really made me scratch my head.
I know companies want to compensate their executives for meeting performance goals and also to attract better executives,
but, I'm sorry, the fed's attempt at regulating CEO total compensation that started during Clinton's presidency and the revived
push today is just ridiculous.
First of all, the way they refer to it (tax deduction) made it totally confusing for me thinking they'll somehow
have a lower tax liability after using that deduction After hours of reading rofl I realized that
the tax deduction is in fact a compensation limit and if you read my first reaction above you'll see how confused I was lol.
First, everywhere I've looked the proposed 500,000 limit is referred to as a tax deduction, it needs to be called ceo pay limit or something similar because
that's what it is. Any compensation paid to the CEO is salary expense and falls under general business expense from what I gathered so it'll always
be friggin deductible. Grrrr I'm either alone in this or am I missing something?
To return back to the topic, nowthat I learned that Clinton's cap on executives' pay had the opposite effect,
I can only be very sceptical about this new proposal and think that a similar law is doomed for failure, because you can't limit
how much the board is paying them, but you can make a new law that gives the shareholders power to decide what compensation package
is appropriate.