acknowledgments

The average effective corporate tax rate has increased slightly in recent years, but the economic upheaval caused by Covid-19, the official response to the pandemic and the burst of inflation that followed make it impossible to correlate the Trump tax cuts with corporate performance or tax payments. [...] The pandemic exposed more clearly than ever before the myth behind the Great Man Theory: no one individual in the corner office—nor even the handful in the executive suite—is responsible for corporate success. [...] In 2018 Musk received the largest pay package in history: nearly $2.28 billion of stock options as a “performance award.” In the intervening years, with the rise in the price of Tesla shares, the value of those options has grown to an eye-watering $56 billion. [...] In early 2009, with the country struggling through the recession the company had helped cause, the board of AIG announced plans to hand out about $165 million in bonuses to the very same executives responsible for pushing the company—and the nation—to the brink of collapse the preceding year. [...] For corporations to reward a handful of top executives more than they are contributing to the cost of all the public services needed for our economy to thrive reflects the deep flaws in our public regulation of corporations.