This is the interior of Rush Limbaugh's private jet. Still not kidding.
Hmm. It looks like maybe we shouldn't stop talking about tax breaks for corporate jets.
Among the many things that has been proposed as a modest way to raise revenue rather than, you know, flushing the entire U.S. economy down the toilet just for the hell of it is modifying the depreciation schedule for corporate aircraft. For some reason this turned out to be a gigantic deal, and was painted by everyone from House leadership to the corporate-jet-owning Rush Limbaugh as an apocalyptic proposal that would doom us all. Sure, we could modify the depreciation schedule for corporate jets from five years to seven years, but what kind of world would that be? Some say the survivors would envy the dead!
So we've been left with "debt ceiling" negotiations in which even the most piffling little things like this are absolutely unacceptable to the GOP. Can't happen. We'd rather default on the debt. Cutting "entitlements" is an absolute requirement, and cutting everything else, that's fine—but not even the vague hint of anything resembling a "revenue increase." Even though tax cuts to this very group (corporations and the wealthy) are the very reason we've got this deficit in the first place, and even though the wealthy are paying a smaller share of taxes than they have in generations, it's non-negotiable. Can't return to Clinton tax rates; can't return to Reagan tax rates, either. And don't you dare tax our damn private jets.
In a follow up to that particular GOP conniption, however, Mother Jones points out a new report that notes that companies that rack up a lot of private jet usage tend to be—and here we need to pause, to give us all a moment to get ready to act appropriately shocked—exactly the sort of companies that maybe we shouldn't be too eager to coddle. Namely, they tend to be among the worst offenders in other areas, as well:
Last year, executives for Mylan, the Pittsburgh-based generic drug maker, took the company's two corporate jets on hundreds of flights to vacation hotspots such as Las Vegas, Miami, and the California wine country. The worst offender was CEO Bob Coury, who racked up $535,590 in personal jet flights on the company dime. Of course, Coury's air travel perk pales in comparison to his overall pay package of $23 million, which included a big raise pegged to a 15 percent bump in the company's share price. As long as Mylan rakes in profits, should shareholders care that its execs expense a few fun-filled weekend getaways?
The short answer is yes, according to a new report from GovernanceMetrics International, a corporate oversight consultancy. Lavish spending on corporate jets rarely theatens to break a company on its own, but "if you're looking for a red flag to provoke a wider look at a company's governance and accounting practices, unusually high corporate jet perks is usually a pretty good one," the report says. Among the Fortune 500 companies that doled out CEO jet perks last year, the top 10 percent of spenders, or 18 companies, all ranked worse than average on one or more measures of shareholder risk or excessive corporate pay.
It makes sense, when you think about it: companies that let their executives jet around the country on private planes for no reason in particular are ones that, by definition, tend to blow a lot of shareholder money on executive perks.
Why do we reward bad behavior? Because those same bad actors give a lot of corporate money to the GOP in order to have that behavior defended, and because people like Rush Limbaugh, a poster child himself for the ultra-rich and ultra-spoiled, spend their days talking about how noble people like that are, and how savage people who, say, need food stamps or medical care are.
In cases like this, however, it's the company investors themselves that are the ones getting most immediately screwed. When a company bases its measure of "success" on how lavishly it can provide for the top few members of its corporate nobility, it points to a wider culture of corruption within that company. The best thing investors can do is divest from such companies, but having government turn the screws a little to discourage bad corporate behavior would be a fine thing in itself.