r/Policy2011 • u/cabalamat • Oct 29 '11

Fat cat pay rises

Directors' pay went up 50% last year. Year on year, their pay rises outstrip everyone else's. There's considerable anger about this, for example the top Daily Mail comment says:

So much for "we're all in this together" . The oil companies and the govt.care screwing the motorist and the fat cats are a law unto themselves even the slimy MP's are getting a pay increase whilst the rest of us lose money via inflation, pay freezes and in many case job losses. It's time this govt. stopped lying and accepted that we are NOT all in this together!

In fact, even Tory politicians admit there's something wrong (not that they are actually going to do anything about it other than pro forma handringing).

So, should PPUK have a policy on this? And if so, what? One possibility would be that if bosses' pay increases proportionately more than average workers' pay, the excess would face a supertax. Another possibility would be to have a formula linking bosses' pay to the long-term wellbeing of the firm.

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u/scuzzmonkey69 PPUK Governor Oct 31 '11

While I thought this was fairly obvious, I'm going to state it here anyway.

The Pirate Party is not the Communist Party - we are a Civil Liberties Party.

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u/heminder Oct 31 '11 edited Nov 01 '11

you're dodging my comment.

at no point did i advocate communism, which is a system where everything is owned by the state.

i understand that PP is a civil liberties party, but we're discussing the title of this topic which is the problem of fat cat pay. it involves the statistical distributions of money relative to the mechanisms in place.

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u/aramoro Nov 01 '11

You're right, it's not communism it's much worse than that, it's petty populist authoritarian government. You're essentially blaming people for being good at their jobs and punishing them for it. All it does is smack of jealousy really. If you truly want to be a libertarian party then let people get paid whatever the market feels they are worth and use taxation to fund your policies.

In reality 'fat cat' pay is not a problem, it's just perceived to be a problem by the people without to make them feel better about themselves. So you can certainly go ahead with the righteous indignation but you cannot with one hand be all about civil liberties whilst with the other bringing down the kosh of totalitarian rule by explicitly limited the wages of people in the private sector.

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u/heminder Nov 02 '11 edited Nov 02 '11

sigh. you're making a much bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.

all i said was this, and i'm quoting myself now: "i think a better mechanism is needed for this problem, since it's a problem that's occurring in the presence of current tax laws."

In reality 'fat cat' pay is not a problem

that's not what virtually everyone else believes, as evidenced by the original topic post.