Welfare for the super-rich at GM

A Facebook post from economist Robert Reich

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts/867245209954743

Post by Robert Reich.

•••••

Taxpayers lost $11.2 billion on the GM bailout, and we won’t get it back because the government sold its final GM shares last December. If we saved enough jobs at GM and kept the regional economy afloat, the cost was probably worth it. But I don’t get why we paid GM executives so much. Today, the Special Inspector General for the bailout program charged the Treasury Department with approving “excessive” compensation for top GM executives last year – some $3 million in pay increases for each of nine GM executives, amounting to raises ranging from 4% to 20%, The Treasury Department says it forced GM to shift more of its executive pay to stock-based compensation instead of cash, but the Inspector General reports that the Treasury approved cash salaries for 19 of 21 GM executives that were above the U.S. auto industry’s median salaries for executives at comparable levels in other companies.

It’s not as if these executives did such sterling jobs. Given GM’s failure to recall cars it knew to be unsafe, perhaps the Treasury ought to claw back these fat paychecks. Just saying.