Shocker: North Dakota Democrats Want Pay Limits
For non-profits. In response to “Republican” Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm’s hypocritical class war against the folks at Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Democrats in the North Dakota House have proposed a bill to limit salaries and severance packages for non-profit organizations.
The bill would increase the tax rate of a non-profit executive who makes more than one million dollars.
House Minority Leader Merle Boucher (BU-SHAY) says that penalty may discourage non profits from paying the large salaries.
Boucher says the bill is in response to Blue Cross Blue Shield giving its former executive director a 2-point-2 million dollar severance package. Blue Cross Blue Shield is a non profit that gets tax breaks in North Dakota…
(Rep. Joe Kroeber) “non profit status means they get special tax advantages in areas of not paying property or corporate income taxes. They should not be taking and abusing these statuses by offering excessive contracts to executives.”
These local Democrats are just carrying on a trend started by national liberals. We are in some strange economic times, and the liberals are trying to leverage that to justify an expansion of government power. The liberal left has wanted to control private sector pay for a long time. Earlier in the bailouts debacle Obama himself pushed to enact compensation control for bailed out companies, and suggested that it would be a step toward compensation control for all executives.
This isn’t about protecting the public or enacting sound policy. This is about big government liberals wanting to expand the power of government. In short, it’s a power grab.
And I say that as no apologist for Blue Cross Blue Shield. I am extremely uncomfortable with that company’s domination of North Dakota’s insurance market. Any time a company has over a 90% market share something fishy is going on. But if we’re worried about that we should ask ourselves what sort of government regulations have allowed BCBS to dominate like that. Maybe we should start with the company’s non-profit status.
But compensation controls are just plain un-American. This is supposed to be a free country, where people can be as successful as they want to be. The government has no more business controlling compensation levels for executives than it has controlling the price of bread and milk.
