Press Room

One of the things brought up was a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future showing that the CEOs behind "Fix the Debt" have benefited from tax breaks for executive compensation to the tune of about $1 billion in 2009-11, for just those companies. This tax break lets companies count pay using stock options -- which doesn't cost the companies anything -- as if it were cash pay and thus deduct it against corporate income.

“Before they start calling for cuts that will have a huge impact on ordinary Americans, they should look at the ways they’ve been contributing to the deficit,” said Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

Ms. Anderson's study calculates that 90 corporate members of Fix The Debt paid their CEOs and their next three-highest paid executives more than $6.3 billion between 2009 and 2011. For shelling out this largesse, these companies received tax breaks worth as much as $1.6 billion over that same period, the study estimates.

However one crunches these numbers, one thing is certain: These guys won't be needing Medicare or Social Security. What is not certain is whether their performance-based pay is truly taxpayer subsidized as the study claims.

Others suggest that this data could inadvertently paint an unduly rosy picture – and one that may not be filtering down to all of a country’s inhabitants.

“Countries are now in the midst of this global recession, facing really desperate conditions, so even in a country where you have growth, this growth is coming primarily from extractive industries, particularly oil, gas and mining,” Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank here, told IPS.

“So the successes on this list only represent the ‘one percent’, the elites who are benefiting. So for the World Bank to highlight that these countries are meeting at least one of the MDGs seems a bit superficial – remember, there are eight goals.”

. . . The alternative, she says, would create the space for national governments in developing countries to more actively choose their own development paths. This would include ensuring that those countries maintain the ability to protect particularly valuable sectors.

Countries with large rural populations and agriculture potential, for instance, need to be able to focus on creating opportunities for smallholder farmers to maintain their livelihoods.

The report, from the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, finds that between 2009 and 2011, top executives at the 90 publicly held corporate members of the Fix the Debt coalition raked in at least $953 million — and as much as $1.6 billion — through the “performance pay” loophole, which counts some executive compensation as a tax-deductible business expense, instead of a salary.

. . . “The very taxpayers who pay into and depend on these programs and benefits are subsidizing excessive compensation for the top executives of Fix the Debt member corporations and other large firms,” the report’s authors wrote.

. . . “If Fix the Debt CEOs were serious about addressing our nation’s fiscal challenges, they would push for greater fairness in the tax code, including the elimination of entitlement programs benefiting CEOs like the ‘performance pay’ loophole,” the authors wrote.