"President Obama needs to put more effort and political capital into promoting the middle-class agenda that he outlined during the campaign," including "a fairer distribution of profits among shareholders, executives and employees," the New York Times editorializes this morning.
This is mystifying. I was paying fairly close attention during the campaign and don't recall Mr. Obama ever calling explicitly for "a fairer distribution of profits among shareholders, executives and employees." If he had done so, he might have been challenged to define what the fair distribution of such profits would be. Without knowing what "fair" is, it is hard to know what "fairer" is. Fifty percent, fifty percent, and fifty percent? There are some of us still so benighted as to think that profits are what belongs to the shareholders after the company the shareholders own is done paying the executives and the employees. Or that, at the very least, that it should be up to the owners of the company to decide how to divide the profits, not up to the president.
The Times editorialists, while calling for a "fairer" distribution of profits, don't explain themselves what a fair distribution is, either. At the Times, senior reporters are paid $120,000 a year in base salary and just voted themselves a 5 percent pay cut, while chief executive Janet Robinson earned $5.58 million in total compensation in 2008. As for the shareholders, the company didn't have any profits to share with them, so it is not paying any dividends. Disclosure: As a small Times shareholder, I got tired of waiting for a "fairer" distribution, and sold my stake earlier this year.