The Walt Disney Company has (at last) seen its stock price bounce upwards this year by 26% ... after a long period of languish. Analysts attribute this to the Mouse's oncoming streaming platforms, its hard-charging amusement parks (where the average family needs to take out an equity line of credit to finance a four-day visit), and its gangbuster performance at the box office. Meantime ...
... Abigail Disney, a filmmaker and the grand niece of Walt Disney, penned an opinion column outlining her arguments against Disney’s pay practices [for its CEO/Chairman].
In her op-ed, which was published in the Washington Post with the headline “It’s time to call out my family’s company — and anyone else rich off their workers’ backs,” Disney said the pay of Robert Iger (which she says was $65 million in 2018) ... was “naked indecency.”
“That’s 1,424 times the median pay of a Disney worker. To put that gap in context, in 1978, the average CEO made about 30 times a typical worker’s salary. Since 1978, CEO pay has grown by 937 percent, while the pay of an average worker grew just 11.2 percent. ...”
Of course, in 1978, the top marginal tax rate was 70%, which might have had something to do with executive pay being less exorbitant. The top rate is now around half that.
Companies love to claim that big CEO payouts are "tied to corporate performance", but companies have ways of nuding performance up and down quarter to quarter, and don't kid yourself. Top-dog execs manage to get boards to vote them big pay days, even when their corporations don't do well. (When Michael Eisner was running Disney, he managed to get the Disney board of directors to pay him and then-President Robert Iger sizable bonuses in a year the copmany wasn't doing well. How about that?)
The issue here, really, is a global one. Bob Iger is in the mainstream of big corporate paydays for top brass. What he's doing might seem greedy, but it's normal behavior, here in the second decade of the 21st Century. If Abigail Disney and others want to change the current behaviors of company CEOs and other high earners, then marginal tax rates need to be raised, along with other disincentives for high rollers who rake in every last time they can get.
In the age of Eisenhower, when the U.S. of A. was growing robustly, the top tax rate was 90%. And the Republic didn't fall. There is no reason that taxs can't be structured so that the big money doesn't pay more to sop up some of the red ink currently sloshing around. Maybe we can get back to corporate cheifs making 300 times the median age of their employees, instead of 1,424.
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