Let's be absolutely clear about the agenda of the chief austerity pushers and their mouthpieces Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles: greed. They want the 99 percent, and particularly the elderly and the poor, to subsidize their own very healthy entitlement system. The Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America's Future have released a new report that details just how huge the taxpayer-funded subsidy for the CEOs active in the Bowles/Simpson-fronted Fix the Debt campaign is, and why they're fighting so hard to keep it, at our expense.

U.S. corporations are able to deduct huge executive payouts from their income taxes using a "performance pay" tax loophole. Since 1993, the tax deduction for executive pay has been set at $1 million. But the there's the loophole, which excludes "performance-based pay" from that cap. And it's a massive loophole. That's particularly true for the 90 publicly held corporations that are members of Fix the Debt, which the report finds, paid out $6.3 billion in tax-deductible executive compensation in just three years, 2009-2011. The tab to taxpayers for that executive subsidy is between $953 million and $1.6 billion. Which is not going to fix the debt. In fact, it's adding to it. A few examples:



Health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group enjoyed the biggest taxpayer subsidy for its CEO pay largesse. The nation’s largest HMO paid CEO Stephen Hemsley $199 million in total compensation between 2009 and 2011. Of this, at least $194 million went for fully deductible “performance pay.” That works out to a $68 million taxpayer subsidy to UnitedHealth Group – just for one individual CEO’s pay. A just-released proxy reveals that Hemsley pocketed another $28 million in “performance pay” in 2012, which computes into a tax break for UnitedHealth of nearly $10 million. Discovery Communications stood next in line for a government handout. Between 2009 and 2011, CEO David Zaslav pocketed $114 million, $105 million of this in exercised stock options and other fully deductible “performance pay.” That translates into a $37 million taxpayer subsidy for Discovery and its lavish executive pay policies. In 2012, Zaslav hauled in enough additional “performance pay” to generate a tax break worth $9 million. Even big losers win with the “performance pay” loophole. Gambling titan Caesars Entertainment has hemorrhaged money in recent years, driving CEO Gary Loveman’s stock options underwater. Loveman managed, even so, to take home $9.6 million in cash bonuses between 2009-2011, a windfall that’s generating taxpayer subsidies the firm can cash in to lower its taxes over years to come.

These CEOs are raking in obscene levels of pay, and lobbying very hard to protect this loophole, while at the same time insisting that the debt has to be fixed by slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. They aren't content with screwing the American taxpayer with their massive pay subsidies, they want to strip even more out ofretirement and health security—which every working person in America has paid into—to protect their continued largesse.

And they have the gall to say their campaign is about the deficit.

There's ongoing discussion of this report in teacherken's diary.