Good results or bad, real or fake, job creation or job cuts, it's all the same to corporate America. Regardless of the deliverables, executive compensation never stops rising. The same people in Congress who believe until their dying day that tax changes can make or break business never make the same link with executive compensation. Apparently they must believe that negative tax consequences for business (and I mean the business itself) would not encourage or discourage behavior. We can offer tax incentives or tax penalties for everything else but not for executive pay. Funny how that works.
The compensation research firm Equilar recently compiled data about chief executive pay at 200 companies that filed their proxies by March 28 and had revenues of at least $6.5 billion. And the data illustrates Mr. Hodgson’s point. It shows that average compensation for chief executives who had held the job at least two years rose 5 percent in 2007, to $11.2 million (If new C.E.O.’s are counted, that number is $11.7 million). Even though performance-based bonuses were down last year, the value and prevalence of discretionary bonuses — ones not linked to performance — were up. A result is that C.E.O.’s who have held their jobs for two years received an average total bonus payout of $2.8 million, up 1.1 percent from 2006.
