One more reason to love reading Declan:

I am not going to blog about today’s front page National Post story, “Canada ‘adrift’: CEOs. Political ‘vacuum’ threatens nation’s standard of living” –

– other than perhaps pointing out that when the article warns of “skyrocketing government spending — up 20% on a per-capita basis over the past five years”, and the CEO’s say, “The country’s fiscal base remains strong, but is threatened by runaway spending growth,”, a balanced approach might have contrasted this whining with the fact that CEO compensation increased by roughly 100% last year.

If this pace of increase was to be sustained for 5 years (and as the Globe article notes, “Compensation experts say the surge in total payouts is likely the beginning of a string of banner years for top executives”), this would compound to a 3100% gain over 5 years.

Actually, if they kept doubling every year, CEO salaries would quickly dwarf pretty much every other economic indicator. Soon the sheer mass of paper required to print the thousand-dollar bills needed to pay them would outweigh the planet itself; the Bank of Canada would probably have to switch our currency from the dollar to the atom in an attempt to buy time.

Even that wouldn’t work; the conceptual mass of their salaries would wind up triggering a gravitational event of such a magnitude that our solar system would collapse in on itself, creating an enormous black hole from which nothing could escape except regular news releases demanding deep tax cuts for the quasar industry.

Clearly, something must be done.