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When the Securities and Exchange Commission released its CEO pay rule this week, many cheered it as a way to shame companies into moderating outlandish pay packages. The rule, which goes into effect in 2017, mandates that publicly-traded companies disclose the gap between what their top executives are paid and what their rank and file workers make. As the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson put it, "because the rule will generate an easily graspable and often decidedly shocking number, it may energize a cadre of new combatants in the executive pay fight." It could have the opposite effect.

- Former New York Times Co (NYT.N) Chief Executive Janet Robinson received a total payout of nearly $24 million after she left the newspaper publisher at the end of last year, according to a regulatory filing on Friday. Robinson, a 28-year veteran with the company, has yet to be replaced by Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, who is temporarily acting in her place. Robinson's package includes a $4.5 million consulting fee that The Times had agreed to pay as part of her exit package, as well as pension benefits and performance-related payments. Excluding the consulting fee, Robinson would have...

Few things raise the dander of radical egalitarians more than the growth of CEO pay. The umbrage is as much aesthetic as it is economic, as evidenced by the fact that the most impassioned complaints leveled against these corporate titans are not so much criticisms of their failure to deliver value for money but over the gap between CEO pay and wages for everybody else. That's because the former criticism raises the inconvenient question, value to whom? And therein lays the answer to the riddle posed by this column. First the facts. CEO pay has undoubtedly been on a tear....

Want to see what populist-driven liberalism will do for the private sector? Take a gander at the latest comments from Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Frank, who told CNBC Congress had been focusing on executive compensation prior to the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), since “TARP was an infield covering” as he put it, said it’s time for a punitive compensation system to discourage “excessive risk taking.” The Massachusetts congressman was asked by Dennis Kneale on CNBC’s June 10 “Power Lunch” how much executives should be punished if a company loses money...

The top leaders of the 5,3241 charities in America evaluated by Charity Navigator2 earn an average salary of $148,9723. This represents a modest pay raise of 2.55% over the previous year studied, and is similar to last year’s pay raise of 2.34%. All together, the salaries total nearly $770 million. Although this is a considerable amount of money, CEO compensation accounts for just 3.32% of an average organization's total spending....

Today has been a busy day in Washington, House caved in to the new president and voted to delay the digital TV conversion - that means hundreds of millions more in advertising and planning of the conversion. Amendments were flying left and right in the Senate in hopes of salvaging the spending...err stimulus bill and finally Obama announced the beginning of fascism. Cleverly playing on the fears and anger of the American public, today Obama unveiled that all CEOs of companies that are currently receiving TARP money will be capped to $500,000 in pay and quickly reminding the public that...

The GOP candidate's call to allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation is seen as an appeal to middle-class voters and the unions John McCain threw a dash of populist pepper into an otherwise fairly traditional Republican stew of economic policies with his June 10 proposal to allow shareholders a vote on executive compensation. The idea, known informally among executive-pay activists as Say on Pay, put McCain into strange company: It has been promoted heavily by unions, and it was introduced in the Senate in April by none other than Barack Obama. (snip) "For too long, government has been the...

Republican White House candidate John McCain will promise on Tuesday to lower corporate tax rates if he wins the U.S. presidency and ease the tax burden on middle-class workers to help revive the faltering economy. The Arizona senator, who has wrapped up his party's presidential nomination, also would propose a simpler, alternative tax system and insist that chief executives' pay and severance packages have shareholder approval. "No matter which of us wins in November, there will be change in Washington. The question is what kind of change?" McCain will tell a conference for small businesses, referring to his Democratic opponent,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican White House candidate John McCain will promise on Tuesday to lower corporate tax rates if he wins the U.S. presidency and ease the tax burden on middle-class workers to help revive the faltering economy. The Arizona senator, who has wrapped up his party's presidential nomination, also would propose a simpler, alternative tax system and insist that chief executives' pay and severance packages have shareholder approval. "No matter which of us wins in November, there will be change in Washington. The question is what kind of change?" McCain will tell a conference for small businesses, referring to...

Rush Limbaugh again today castigated the Republican nominee for president, Senator John McCain, this time for suggesting that the government should "do something" about the excesses of CEO pay compared to the pay of the average worker. There were two things wrong with this: in the first plaee, John McCain in no way suggested government action in interfering with a company's right to determine the pay of its workers - including its chief executive. The only politicians running for president who have favored such action are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

More than at any time in a decade, official Washington is focused on how to curb the gilded pay packages of corporate executives. The problem: It's not easy to legislate a pay cut for some of America's most powerful people. It's clear that the issue has gained traction this month, thanks to public concern about income inequality, investor outrage over pay at companies such as The Home Depot, and the politics of a new Democratic Congress ...The recent signs include: •As part of a minimum-wage hike under consideration in the US Senate, new taxes would be imposed on one important...

"Too often executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance," said Buffett in his 2005 letter. "Huge severance payments, lavish perks and outsized payments for ho-hum performance often occur because comp committees have become slaves to comparative data." Buffett said compensation committee members are bombarded with pay statistics and told about new perks that other managers are receiving. "In this manner, outlandish 'goodies' are showered upon CEOs simply because of a corporate version of the argument we all use as children: 'But, Mon, all the other kids have one.'" The billionaire investor, known as the Oracle...

Buffeted by a declining stock market and sagging corporate performance, overall pay for Chief Executive Officers at some of the largest U.S. companies fell 4% in 2001, to $10.46 million, according to compensation consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners. It was the first decline since 1993 as measured by the firm's survey of approximately 50 top companies and was most attributable to declines in annual bonus and stock option value. "It's clear that 2001 was a transitional year, with companies reassessing how they deliver executive pay," said Steven E. Hall, Managing Director of Pearl Meyer & Partners. "Stock options and other...