(10-28-2019, 12:39 PM)jj82284 Wrote:

(10-28-2019, 10:48 AM)mikesez Wrote: A CEO is lucky if he fully understands the cause-effect relationships between his own decisions and the success of the business he (or she) is leading.

CEOs are putting out statements crediting these tax cuts just because they want more where that came from.

Wage growth comes from growth in productivity combined with a scarcity of skilled labor.  Nobody can snap their fingers and create either condition.  

A CEO can make certain investments in technology and training to increase the productivity of their own workforce, but he can not, on his own, lower the unemployment rate to create the scarcity of skilled labor.  President Trump reducing certain visas has helped more, but even that only marginally.  I'd give the tax cut almost 0 credit - all indications are that most of the corporations just added that new money to the cash pile or issued larger dividends.  There is very little evidence that they drove any significant amount of it into tech or training.

What are you talking about?  CEOs most definately have control over HIRING people.  The greater the incentive to risk capital for ROI, the more people are hired, less available to work greater pressure on the labor market and so on.  The idea that a CEO is oblivious to the factors that contributed to their own decision for capital expansion is mental gymnastics.  

Moreover, in the global economy as a whole we have to compete for capital investment with foreign markets. Previously our Global competitiveness was hampered by our nearly world-leading corporate tax rate. Lowering that rate invariably invited a lot of capital investment back home. Even Tim Cook someone who's not a fan of Donald Trump's in general acknowledged that this was a major contributing factor to Apple's decision to expand domestically. The fact that you pointed out that corporations direct capital to markets that treat Capital favorably boost my point not yours.

Again in some part you have a point. Donald Trump didn't directly hire the workers Donald Trump didn't directly mandate the capital was invested. However, he did create conditions that predictably attract capital the expansion of business & the hiring of people.  Those factors create the economic conditions for wage growth.

Most jobs are created in response to immediate demand.  More work coming in, hire more people to do it.  A CEO isn't just going to hire somebody out of a vague feeling that the economy is good, just so they can twiddle their thumbs on  the clock.

A much smaller number of jobs are created in an R&D kind of situation to hopefully create something totally new that demand doesn't yet exist for.  Those you can credit to CEO vision.  But the vast majority of jobs are created by marketplace demand that's beyond the influence of even the most visionary CEO.

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