Press Room

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.

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.

"Companies in the Fix the Debt coalition, which advocates for federal austerity policies, qualified for $1 billion or more in tax breaks tied to executive pay packages from 2009 to 2011, according to a new report by the liberal think tanks Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future.

"The four highest-paid executives at the firms received a total of $6.3 billion in pay over the period, according to the report. Federal tax law allows companies to deduct executive pay based on performance from the firm's tax bill as a business expense. This performance-based compensation includes stock options, stock awards and other types of incentive pay. These 90 companies qualified for tax perks totaling between $1 billion and $1.5 billion over the course of three years, depending on how many types of pay firms actually deducted."