Pay caps at public housing authorities but not at other poverty targeted programs?

I’ve asked the question many times- how can the CEO of a “non-profit” that gets its entire funding from the federal government to distribute and manage tax dollars targeted to the poor- pay herself $3 million a year?

How do hospitals, which receive a lion’s share of their revenue from Medicare and Medicaid, claim “non-profit” status, get to skip out on property taxes, yet pay top executives $4 million a year?

How do defense contractors, with huge cost overruns on military programs, justify these overruns while paying their top executives seven-figure salaries?

Yet the President of the United States makes only $400,000 and members of Congress take home less than $200,000 a year. Seems like something is seriously wrong with these compensation structures.

Well, the federal government must be paying attention, because they’ve now enacted limits on directors of public housing authorities- a grand step in the right direction toward fiscal accountability in a country where taxpayers are now being assigned an extra tax to pay for street lights (while the same politicians have no problem giving away multimillion dollar facilities to vulture capitalists).

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is instituting a permanent salary cap of $155,000 for top officials at public housing authorities, following reports of oversized compensation packages that included roughly $600,000 for the top official at the Atlanta Housing Authority….

“When Americans across the country are struggling to make ends meet and then they turn around and see public officials making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars, it just creates public cynicism about the federal government,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog organization. Lack of transparency in government spending allows “hijinks like this to occur,” Ellis added….

Earlier this year HUD announced a $155,500 cap on top executive salaries at larger public housing authorities for the 2012 fiscal year. The new plan would make the new limits permanent and apply them to all forms of compensation paid for with federal money.The new regulations would cap salaries for top officials at $125,926 at housing authorities with between 250 and 1,249 units and at $88,349 for agencies with fewer than 250 units.

via Officials move to limit pay at public housing authorities | oregonlive.com.

I’ve called for limits on pay based on average wages of employees in publicly traded companies to restore sanity to our financial system which is now being manipulated with disastrous results to create short-term stock inflation instead of long-term stability and growth.

I’ve also called for the federal government to stop doing business with companies that can’t justify outlandish pay gaps between payroll and executive perks and pay.

It’s time to put some sanity back into compensation systems so that pay is actually connected to risk and accountability to shareholders and taxpayers.

If you want to make outlandish money, feel free to take your company private and not do business with the government, because we can’t keep subsidizing public housing or the life styles of the rich and plunderous.

It’s now obvious that our government can step in to limit pay, the question is when are we going to do it across the board to restore our country to financial health and fairness?

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