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Name:	Swimmer27 -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/4/2009 6:21:18 PM

Now that you have limited executive pay in the financial sector I am encouraging you do go even further. First lets look at politicians. Their pay should be capped at the salary paid them by the taxpayers. No speaking fees, no book deals. no real estate transaction that net a profit, or will net a profit in the future, nothing. No more double dipping by drawing a salary out of your campaign accounts either. The published salary is just that, YOUR SALARY. Live on it, or quit. Next, lobbyist. Thats right, the ones that have no place in your administration anyway, so they should be set to the same cap, $500,000. The recent revelations that Tom Daschle has made over 5 million dollars in the last two years 'lobbying' is just disgusting. At least the CEO's did something for thier money. A lobbyist just makes 'back room' deals.

When you take care of these get back to me Mr. President and I will tell you what group we should go after next. I don't want to tip my hand, but Shakespeare got it right way back when...:<)

Name:	MartiniMan -	Reply
Subject:	I'm excited
Date:	2/4/2009 8:40:41 PM

My partner and I in a fit of patriotic duty have decided to limit our salaries to $500K per year. I am looking forward to all the extra money. I am thinking a new banned boat, a house in the Ridge and a wine cellar that makes WW drool with envy.

This ladies and gentlemen is what you get when you take the moronic government as your partner in business. Lets imagine you are a highly sought after executive and you had to choose between a government funded business that limits your salary to an artificial number or will you seek what the market will pay? I know my answer. Make a deal with the devil and you get what you bargained for.......

Name:	water_watcher -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 9:37:57 AM

I can't believe that Pelosi is out talking about the perks that executives get and they need to stop ... when she has her ugly face have the tax payers fly her back and forth to California. And while that goes with the job, she did not think the plane was big enough so ordered a larger one that costs about 75,000 to fly each way. So every round trip she wastes 150,000 of tax payer money and she thinks 500,000 is enough for executives to make.

This is sick how the dems are destroying capitalism that made our country the envy of the world.

And I saw a good piece on CNBC ... the government loans all this money to some of the financial institutions that got in trouble due to the mandated loan requirements put in place by the democrats. So now, you want the most talented people to run those institutions, yet you may only get the B players since the A players will go to where they can be rewarded more appropriately.

So if you loaned someone $50 billion .... do you want the best talent managing that even if it costs you a little more, or do you want who ever you can get that is willing to take the job at the limited pay?

Name:	ecstasypoint -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 9:50:25 AM

and what does her "ugly face" have to do with it?

Name:	Council Roc Doc -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 10:42:17 AM

WW, this is actually a policy that I look favorably upon. When a bank or business asks for public funding to stay afloat, we then become shareholders and should dictate what an executive for these companies can make. You feed at the public trough then you open yourself up to government scrutiny. It should be an incentive to pay back the TARP money ASAP rather than delay the payback (or not pay it back at all) and become profitable again, at which time the company's shareholders and board of directors will be able to vote and set salary. On this one I say that Obama got it right.

Name:	Council Roc Doc -	Reply
Subject:	I'm excited
Date:	2/5/2009 10:50:36 AM

A truer reality is that a few of these executives who decide to run to a greater payday for themselves, rather than ethically stick to a company to see it pay back the TARP money, will potentially be recruited by foreign banks etc. They will then be directly in a position to compete with the institutions that received bailout money. We lose again.

Name:	Swimmer27 -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 11:10:42 AM

I am torn on this one. I see both sides of the argument but for the inequality of the enforcement. Does the cap only apply to the CEO. What about the CFO? COO? Company lawyer? The list goes on and on. What about the banks lobbyist?

What about Hollywood? There was TARP money for them also. So now do we cap actors at 500G. I would be all for that one...lol.

I have never understood why the execs would be getting such high pay while tehy run a company into the ground. If the company is making money it is a non-issue, but loosing billions and still getting millions a year is cray.

Name:	water_watcher -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 12:28:26 PM

That would be true if the same person that created the mess is who is being paid to fix it. What I am saying is if you give someone the boot and then need to bring in talent to start moving the ship in the right direction ... most times you need to pay for that talent. Yes $500,000 sounds like a lot of money, but top talent in the CEO ranks and specifically in huge financial institutions that is not even close to the level top talent earns. If they do it, they will do it for the ego, not the money.

But if foreign banks will pay the price for top talent, then you will have CEO's going to the foreign banks ... is that the right answer as the tax payers are loaning the money to clean up the mess that we have the 2nd rate talent doing it?

Name:	water_watcher -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 12:32:10 PM

I will say if top talent believes the turn around can happen and they can make it happen .... as long as they can get stock compensation over the $500,000 then they will do it. But you can't start limiting what top talent can make, otherwise they will go where they can make it.

Name:	water_watcher -	Reply
Subject:	President Obama
Date:	2/5/2009 12:35:22 PM

because i have to look at it and it makes me sick everytime I think this is the leader of the US House of representatives and she is so dumb. How embarrassing for our country. If she was ugly and smart it would be much easier to take. Or even a fox and dumb. But being ugly and dumb is too much.

Name:	PikeSki -	Reply
Subject:	Bad things happen when . . .
Date:	2/5/2009 1:01:20 PM

Government gets involved.

Perfect case and example. When the first round of Bail out money went out, they told Well Farge that they were giving them 25 billion of bail out money. Wells Fargo declined the offer saying "we are financially very stable, we never got involved in those risky loans and we are perfectly fine financially so we don't want this government money."

The government 'forced' them to take it anyway.

At the first opportunity they had, Wells Fargo started paying this money back to get out from under it, but the government wouldn't let them pay it all back and will only allow them to pay back according to their payment plan (which is spread out for years).

Move ahead 2 months. Wells Fargo holds 2 major annual events for their top sales and service performers. 1 event is for the top 120 sales people (which by the way brought in over 250 billion for wells fargo last year alone). The Sales conference was to be held in Las Vegas next week.

The other annual event is for the Service side of wells fargo which processes all of the loans. They give this to the top 10 service groups (out of hundereds) in the country. This years trip was to be a 3 day criuse to the bahamas.

My wife's group won the Service conference this year. However, thanks to the new rules and regs by Obama, both of these events have been officially cancelled by Wells Fargo because they didn't want to be seen in the public eye as spending the tax payers 25 Billion (that they didn't want to begin with).

So now, Las Vegas just lost a ton of revenue, and so did Carnival Cruise Lines (not to mention all of the shops and restaraunts) All other smaller Wells Fargo events around the country have also been cancelled as to not be percieved as "Spending the tax payers money".

So how much money is being lost by these stupid rules? A lot!

Thank you BO for taking my wifes reward for working so hard all year to be a top performer and having it cancelled.

I'm sure none of your Staff and/or senators, congressmen, or anyone else in your crooked little team will take any trips on other companies money this year either right! Whats good for the goose . . .

This is yours and the Senates rule. Now you should have to live by them as well.

bunch of &#@*

Name:	water_watcher -	Reply
Subject:	Bad things happen when . . .
Date:	2/5/2009 1:48:31 PM

very well said ... yet Barney Frank is out saying if the banks don't like the rules just give the money back. But like you said .... they can't. There are all sorts of restrictions they placed on returning the money. Other banks like SunTrust locally took TARP dollars not because they needed it, but because it added liquidity and pumped up their balance sheet. But now they are in the same boat .... they took it before all these new rules, now they want to give it back but the government will not let them. I think it is because they do want to control the salaries of the banks and eventually nationalize them.

Fits in with obama's socialist thinking.

Name:	Council Roc Doc -	Reply
Subject:	Bad things happen when . . .
Date:	2/5/2009 2:00:09 PM

I wasn't aware that banks were forced into taking the TARP. However, I have been doing some reading that states the stipulation for exec pay is for those who take future bailout funding. The original TARP recipients are not obligated to limit exec pay.

If banks which were otherwise solvent and profitable on their own terms were forced to make risky loans by government and subsequently failed, then forced to take bailout money from the taxpayers, then given mandated maximum wage scales for executive pay, then I would say this was all a contrived effort toward socialism/and I dare say Marxism. But wait......nahhhh....couldn't be....could it?

Name:	Talullahhound -	Reply
Subject:	I'm really on the fence here
Date:	2/7/2009 12:01:10 AM

It doesn't seem fair to penalize people that have worked for a goal to suddenly have the prize snatched from them. I think these competitions work well for creating incentive for people to work hard and creatively; and you cannot discount the bond it strengthens between the team members and their bond with the company. And I'm sure the people being rewarded are not the ones setting monitary and lending policies for the bank.

On the other hand, I'm well acquainted with the idea of appearing to be a good steward of the government's money. Did you know that as a government employee, I would be banned from accepting an upgrade to first class on an airplane, even if it didn't cost the government any more money? It was because it could create an appearance of not being a good steward of the taxpayers money. Not that anyone on the plane would necessarily know that I was a government employee, but that was the rule.

I see where Obama is going with these rules. It doesn't look good if executives are getting huge bonus' when they companies are taking bail outs. Bet a lot of high priced lawyers and accountants are reading the new reguations very carefully for the inevitable loop holes. Someone will come up with the way around this. I'm pretty sure that Washington would be incapable of coming up with an airtight rule.

Name:	MartiniMan -	Reply
Subject:	Business v government
Date:	2/7/2009 11:44:08 AM

The reality here is that we have to ask ourselves a fundamental question, "Does the senior executive team make a difference?" Based on my 25 years in business I have never seen a great company without great leadership and every lousy company I have been around has had lousy leadership. So in my experience leadership does make a difference. So what we have in effect is Mr. Obama handicapping the very firms that we the American people have invested our hard earned money by saying you cannot go out into the marketplace and compete for talent with those fortunate firms that didn't take money from Uncle Sam. That is just plain dumb, but consistent with the mindset of a leftist community organizer.

Some will say its unfair to have them make so much money when the company failed and needed a government bailout. That may be appealing but it is intellectually vacuous. Imagine me saying I am not going to invest in GE because they paid Jack Welch $20M. But then my advisor says to me, "Wait a second, GE pays a 7% dividend and 12% annual returns to its shareholders, why do you care how much Uncle Jack makes?" The answer, I shouldn't and neither should the Messiah. He should only care that the leadership returns the company to financial health and returns the money given them by the government. Driving away top talent to more lucrative opportunities is exactly the wrong thing to do.

And that my friends is just another in a long list of reasons for limited government and why socialism has never worked in all of history.

Name:	Talullahhound -	Reply
Subject:	Business v government
Date:	2/7/2009 1:33:42 PM

Big rewards does bring in big talent. And nobody much cared how much they earned when they were bringing in the business and the money. But, it's hard to sell that to the working class guy who has just lost his job and can't even envision earning $500K a year, much less millions.
But, I agree with you. The guys making that kind of money have a lot of vision,take a lot of risks and exist under the kind of pressure that few of us could withstand. So if they get big $$$ then so be it.

Name:	Swimmer27 -	Reply
Subject:	One point MM
Date:	2/7/2009 5:39:43 PM

As I understand it the lucky ones that got th eir money in the first round are exempt from the 500K rule. So what you have now is all the 'good ole boys' in the right network ( paulsons and gietners (sp) buddies ) got bailed out and can continue to make the big bucks. Meanwhile all the second tier companies and institutions are coming along now desperate for money. These will suffer from 'talent flight' and get gobbled up by the big boys. I am not much of a conspiracy guy, but this couldn't be a better scenario for a select few, and apparently paulson and gietner got to do the selecting.

Name:	MartiniMan -	Reply
Subject:	The little guy
Date:	2/8/2009 9:05:51 AM

I agree its a hard sell with the little guy which is all the more frustrating because they are the ones that get it in the shorts. Sure, some big shots lost their jobs with this mess but most will never have to work another day in their lives if they don't want to. The little guy gets stuck in a company where they can't attract top talent and who loses his or her job? The little guy. And when the stock goes down who loses a greater percentage of their retirement? The little guy.

Unfortunately these are also the very same people that turn to the government for solutions when the government is the one creating the problems and then using class envy to deflect all the blame on others.

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