is how many people you could employ for a year for $306 billion, at a cost of $70 per hour, for 40 hour work week, 50 weeks per year.
Those people would then go out and spend the money, generating some velocity and additional jobs.
or at a mean hourly rate of only $15,000 - you could get 1,000 of the top financial executives in the USA, for a year.
That is, to be fair, taking the mean only for the top 20 or so CEOs.
So it'll buy you a bunch of COO and CFOs for matched sets.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
On the shopping day known as “Black Friday,” activists held protests at Walmart stores across the country to protest the company’s low wages. In one of the eight press releases the company issued in the 24 hours between Thanksgiving Day and the close of the November 29 “Black Friday,” shopping day…
It's just been a week for metric errors. Via Media Matters comes an impressive
list of stories in the media about the automobile companies financial problems, where they cite labor costs as a major issue. So far, so good. But in virtually every
story about this, you'll find a statement along the…
I am talking about Bill Gates, of course.
Most people have read the recent reports that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's personal net worth exceeds 40 billion dollars. Consider that he made this money in the 22 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you assume he worked 14 hours a…
While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier last year. This post was originally published on March 6, 2012. The final rule on home health workers has not yet been published.
By Liz Borkowski
Back in December, the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division published a proposed…
And that $70/hr number is completely bogus, too. The people who came up with that number divided GM's total labor and pension costs including retirees by the number of hours worked. The actual wage is more like $28/hr. Yes, there are benefits on top, but nowhere near $42/hr for the people actually working--more like $10-14, assuming a similar rate to my employer's benefits rate.
Regarding, say, General Motors, I can speak as someone who was for 7 years an elected officer in a union chapter affilitaed with United Auto Workers -- oddly enough, the National Writers Union. Beacuse UAW had good benefits...
Rather than attack unions, as the Bush administration tended to do, one might argue that the Japanese automobile industry was subsidized by japan's national healthcare system. Ditto Germany. Ditto Sweden.
Since the Republican party fought tooth and naul for decades against "socialized medicine" our citizens had few alternatives to negotiating with corporations for them to provide medical care and similar benefits.
Now that the USA has socialized the Finance industry and banks, and we have a President Elect who believes in national health care, maybe we can revisit the issue, and save the domestic automobile industry.
NOT, if you please, by handing $2.5 x 10^10 to the insane executives who put all thier eggs in the gas-guzzling SUV niche, and paid a fortune to lobbyists to prevent meaningful extrema to fleet gas mileage.
Oh, yes, at $70 per hour they'd be netting 140k per year, it is clearly off by factor of 2-3.
Of course GM and the others couldn't possibly be expected to set aside funding for future obligations, and like invest them and stuff, they needed the money for their executive bonuses and severance pay.
USA today has an interesting and informative website
http://www.usatoday.com/money/graphics/ceo-comp/flash.htm
'course the head of GM got a miserable $15M, which'd put him at the lower end of the financial big boys - but then they actually contribute to the economy...
In one of the last "good years" at GM, record profits were distributed partly to stockholders, and partly with 10 gigabucks ($1 x 10^10) to top echelons of managements.
Hypothetically, things could have been different if that ten gigabucks had been plowed into R&D for electric and hybrid vehicles.
But when you're busy eating the seed corn and paying lobbyists to classify SUVs as trucks not covered by fleet gasoline mileage figures, then you have abandoned genuine Capitalism, and embraced kleptocracy.
Then you can fly to Washington DC in a 30 megabuck private jet and plead poverty, demanding socialization of the auto industry.
That's morally akin to a child murdering the parents, and then throwing oneself on the mercy of the court, pleading that one is a poor orphan.