Come for the Politics, Stay for the Pathologies



Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Performance Matters

Byron York's article in the Washington Times on the “Pay for Performance Act 2009” would be funny were it not so chilling. Apparently this Act:

…would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The legislation has been approved by the finance committee and will be voted on by the full house sometime this week. It is intended to "prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards."

According to York:

Rep. Alan Grayson, the Florida Democrat who wrote the bill, told me its basic message is "you should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure."

Let’s see: “you should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure.” By those standards I think 98% of Congress should give their salaries back to Timmy to reallocate to someone whose performance warrants it: maybe Barack Obama's Teleprompter?