Fairness in Voting - The Texas Ethics question 

I kind of have an ethics question.  By “kind of” I mean, I think I already know what I’m going to do, but the topic has been on my mind lately so I thought I’d stir up the pot a little in my little corner of cyberspace and get your opinion on it.

I’m in Texas.  Texas is having it’s primaries next week (March 4th, 2008).  Obama and Clinton are in a tight race, although it seems Obama has been getting a ton more endorsements in recent days.  Both candidacies recognize how important Texas and Ohio are for delegates to secure the nomination.

McCain pretty much has the Republican nomination wrapped up (as far as I can tell).  It’s not like he needs just one more vote.

Take a look into my brain and see my thoughts on the matter:

If I vote for McCain, then I’m speaking out my voice for a candidate who will already likely be the nominee.  Is there someone listening to my thoughts?  Oh, never mind. Where was I?  Oh yeah, voting.  I’m hungry.  Anyway, I *really* don’t want Hillary as President, and I’m relatively certain that McCain could beat Hillary hands-down in an election.  I’m really hungry.  Will I do ok in my first Guitar Hero tournament tomorrow?  I don’t know.  Stop thinking about that, there are people listening to us now.  Back to voting dilemma.  I don’t know if McCain could beat Obama, and I don’t want HIM as President either.  Maybe if I vote for Hillary in the primary, it’ll help her win the nomination and then McCain could beat her in the general election.  I wonder if they’ll serve food at the GH tournament?  It is a restaurant / pool hall / bar type of place, and they have good food.  Mmmm, food.  Hey, Kirstie Alley? How’d YOU get in here?  Hold on a sec, lemme get rid of these voyeurs…

On one hand, I don’t want Hillary to be President.  On the OTHER hand, I *really* don’t want Hillary to be President!  If I vote for her, and she gets nomination, and McCain beats her, then I’ve helped my cause.  But if for some unforeseen reason, she DOES get elected President (McCain goofs, lies, or dies), then I will have helped the one thing I don’t want to happen.

And I don’t think I could take that.  Even though according to at least one survey I’ve taken, I’m more in line with Hillary than Obama.

Fairness in Advertising - the Class Envy Card

The second part of this post is Fairness in Advertising.  Obama has a semi-famous radio spot and TV ad in which he says “some CEO’s make more in 10 minutes than our average workers make in a year.”

That really doesn’t seem fair - and for many reasons.

First, he’s promoting class envy.

Second, he’s conveniently leaving out other rich folks, like Oprah, sports figures, and movie stars.  If he were more fair, he wouldn’t be targeting just rich CEO’s (who are evidently easy to hate).

Third, the math seems way off.  The poverty level for a family of 4 is 20K/yr.  If a CEO made that much in 10 minutes, that would make his annual salary 1.05 billion dollars.  I’ve never heard of a CEO making more than a billion dollars in salary.  Even if you throw in bonus and stock.  But maybe *my* math is off, and maybe I’ve been living under a rock.  I’ll try to give benefit of the doubt and make some adjustments:

• I’ll move to 2007’s definition of poverty level for 1 person instead of family of 4 ($10,210)
• I’ll assume the 10 minutes means out of a 40 hr work week
• I’ll remove weekends and holidays from the calculation
• 40 hrs = 2400 minutes; 5 days a week * 52 weeks - 3 wks vacation = 245 work days per year
• These “rich CEO’s” therefore make $2.45 million per day, or $600 million per year

I did a little searching on how much CEO’s make in a year (total compensation) and the one I found real quick was Forbes’ richest Executives list for 2004, and the top person was Mark Reuben w/$147m, then George David at $70m, Richard Fuld at $67m, etc.  This doesn’t seem to jive with the above numbers.  I went to 2005’s numbers and the top guy (Terry Semel with Yahoo) was at $230m.

Ooh, wait, I did find someone.  Steve Jobs, who claimed to take  a $1 paycheck, actually took the top CEO pay spot at $646 million for 2006.  I finally found someone Obama was talking about!  And  you know what, I STILL DON’T CARE!  I’m *glad* Jobs made a ton of money - he deserves it!  He’s brilliant, savvy, creative and I’m afraid to say, very good looking.  Good for him!

But if Obama is going to promote class envy, maybe he should even the stakes a little.  I wonder how well his ads would do if he made mention of any of the following:

• Michael Jordan makes more in one Ball Park Franks Hot Dog ad than the average working American makes all year.
• Tiger Woods makes more in one round of golf than 10 IT Directors’ salaries combined.
• Oprah Winfrey makes more in 1 minute of her show than the average worker in America
• Simon Cowell makes more per insult than an average firefighter in an entire year.

What, they’re saying the same thing… right? 

And here’s the second talk-back section

Good Luck with your inner struggles.

You’re asking us? This is a question for Karl Rove. When it comes to underhanded tactics in Republican politics, he’s your man!

Obama’s “10-minute math” has been calculated up hundreds of times (literally… do a Google search!). Personally, I don’t have a problem with it, because a top CEO has income far exceeding their published salary alone, and a huge chunk of the population lives under the poverty line, so numbers could be made to say anything. What I DO have a problem with is his distinguishing CEOs from other very wealthy people, as you noted. In this respect, he’s kind of hypocritical… but not towards Oprah, who is CEO of Harpo Productions. Slamming one of his biggest supporters is pretty ballsy, but what does she care? She’s obscenely wealthy!

Of course if Obama were promoting ACTUAL “class envy” he wouldn’t restrict his reach to just CEOs… he’d be rallying against ALL of the wealthy. As it is, he’s just trying to illustrate how CEOs get their wealth at the expense of the people working for them (I make 500 million, but my employees can’t afford to go to the doctor!). I may not entirely agree with this, but it does resonate with voters, and that’s all ANY politician ultimately cares about.

All I have to say about this is that voting in the primaries for the person you think is the least likely to win is kind of like winning a race against the kid you kicked to the floor before the gun went off.

According to http://warrenzevon.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1203953033 - there are only 8 CEOs in the US that earn that much (when compared to minimum wage) and 7 of them donate to Democrats and 4 of those donate to Obama.

Regarding your voting strategy question, I’m not sure it seems worth the risk. Note that I voted in the Democratic primary despite the fact that I am not likely to vote Democratic in the actual election. As you said, voting in the Republican primary seemed fairly useless, so I figured I might as well express my opinion among the Democratic candidates. I did not, however, do so strategically, as you suggest. Rather, I just selected the candidate I favored among the reasonable choices. (I’m not very likely to vote Republican in the actual election either, by the way.)

No, I am not a class enviest.

You should vote for whoever you think you should vote for, not for whoever I think you should vote for, because I have my own vote for that.

Your next post better be completely dedicated to the GH tourney!

Christine, thanx for the concern!

Dave2 I didn’t think to Google it first to see if someone had done the math already, but you’re right. And one of them has a convenient link to 666, which is neat. At least I was glad to find my ~$600m figure to be referenced elsewhere, although by a different method.

Hilly, yup, that’s a good way to put it. Although it might be the strategically advantageous thing to do, it still feels underhanded and I can’t go for underhanded.

Ren, heh, I read some of the link and I like how he sais “I don’t know how he plans to fix that, maybe make minimum wage $1,000 and hour or a federally mandated salary cap?” And the 7 out of 8 of richest CEO’s donating Democratically ought to tell you something. This whole class envy still has me defensive. I liked it when SNL did a parody of Ross Perot’s presidential bid where Dana Carvey basically said if he brings up the economy 3%, that’s $120 billion growth and he gets a billion dollars.

Poppy, Sorry I failed you on the completely dedicated part. It was only somewhat dedicated, but I did do some custom artwork!