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I saw an AP article at Yahoo! Finance yesterday that said the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats want to “to rein in compensation at publicly traded companies through nonbinding shareholder votes and by decreasing management influence on pay decisions“.

That sounds like a really good idea.

Why shouldn’t a company’s shareholders be able to go on record about the compensation that the executives receive?

And honestly, does anyone think that very many executives go out of their way to influence their company’s executive compensation committee into lowering their own compensation?

Sure, the shareholders get to vote on the board of directors and could replace them, if they found that they weren’t making good decisions about executive staffing and compensation, but let’s not let little things like details get in the way.

This push has me thinking, though.

The whole point is to tie executive compensation to long term goals, as opposed to short term gains, and to reduce the influence that executives have in the setting of their own compensation levels, right?

Well, if that is truly what the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats really want, why don’t they lead by example?

If you weren’t aware, Congress automatically gets pay raises, each and every year, unless they vote to not get one.  While they voted to forgo next year’s increase, presumably to decrease voter antipathy against incumbents in an election year, they don’t seem too inclined to actually repeal the automatic pay increase system.  In fact, they just got a $4,700 raise in January, which takes their salary to $174,000 per year.

How about instead of Congress getting to decline to receive a pay raise (“No, no, fund raising went very well last year, I really couldn’t spend any more!  You keep the money!”), why don’t we let We the People tell Congress how much of a pay raise (or decrease) it deserves?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think Congress has deserved a raise in a long, long time.

Repealing automatic Congressional pay increases would be a nice bit of change that I can believe in.