Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Congressional Dishonesty


Warren Buffett today takes on the subject of executive compensation, and the absurd legislation presently before Congress designed to permit companies to continue to hide the true amount they pay their top executives.
The only reason for making such an Alice-in-Wonderland assumption is to significantly understate the value of the few options that the House wants counted. This undervaluation, in turn, enables chief executives to lie about what they are truly being paid and to overstate the earnings of the companies they run.
(He ads a bit of derision for the "Enronesque accounting" demonstrated by Congress in its own budgets.)

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman takes on the Republican leadership, noting that while no scandal (real or imagined) was too small to justify investigation under Clinton, nothing the Bush Administration does (no matter how outrageous) is deemed worty of investigation.
Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

1 comment:

  1. In case you were confused (and got hungry), today's Post clarifies that they weren't serving up a "Buffet" - " Warren Buffett's last name was misspelled in the byline of his July 6 op-ed column.".

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.