Yesterday’s headline, Highest-Paid CEOs Often Earn More Than Company Pays in Income Taxes, begs a rewrite, but we‘re not sure where to go with it. Real-life amounts for both numbers are not made available outside executive suites, and those the story goes on to use don‘t even look close. For CEO pay, we’re looking, historically, at hundreds of millions total, maybe billions now, not tens of millions annually, and you'd hope that enlightened gurus would be wondering just how close corporate Federal Income Tax has been gamed down to zero.
Excesses in senior management pay come from stealing public savings by pilfering shares out of their stockholders over long periods of time, the extent of the theft hidden under an absurd theory that dollar amounts cannot be calculated because stock market prices change so much and the number of shares to be eventually looted can’t always be calculated at the time each swindle is planned out. And there is no way anybody in the public arena can figure out how much actual cash Federal Income Tax money a company has posted to IRS computers (after refunds) because 1) Washington goes out of its way to make CPAs shroud that number in titillating mystery, and 2) the IRS won’t tell us.
What we need to know is 1) how many shares the s#ns%fb!tch#s have filched from public stockholders over their careers so far, plus shares targeted for future capers, as well as aggregate other compensation pulled out of all the expense ledgers, and 2) the single net amount, increase or decrease, beside each company’s name on the computerized IRS cash ledger after all additions and subtractions to Federal Income Taxes have been entered for the period between Jan 1 and Dec 31 of each year.
Matching these numbers up kind of defies explanation, and you’d have to figure out what the headline should look like after you’ve decided on a story, if there even is one here. To us, comparing career executive pay to net annual Federal Income Tax paid (or refunded) looks like an Accounting 101 project gone fitfully astray.
Anyway, some Democrat is calling for hearings on whatever that headline meant to him. If proceedings go down, Post readers can delight in following them. It's a sure bet, what the clowns should really be going on about won't even come up.
