Guess Who Gets the Most Brazen Federal Inflation Adjustment in the Country?

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I learned something new today. Apparently the federal government has a cap on the amount it’s willing to reimburse contractors for the salaries of their employees. If someone makes $50,000 per year, no problem. You can charge the feds for their entire salary if they’re working on government business. But if your company’s CEO makes $3 million per year, you can’t charge it all back to the feds even if 100 percent of the CEO’s time is spent on government contracts. The limit, set in 1998, was $340,000.

This cap was allowed to rise with inflation, so you’d figure that by 2011 it would be around $467,000. But no. It was $763,000. Why? Because ordinary inflation adjustments are for chumps, that’s why. For purposes of charging CEO overhead to the federal government, the cap was set at “the median amount of the compensation provided for the five most highly compensated employees of all publicly owned U.S. corporations with annual sales in excess of $50 million for the most recent fiscal year.”

Isn’t that fabulous? When it comes to the minimum wage, we don’t index for inflation at all. But for CEOs earning top-one-percent pay, we not only index for inflation, we index to the rise in CEO salaries. And since CEOs have been relentlessly voting themselves ever more astronomical compensation over the past few decades, we know that number is going to rise a whole lot faster than piddly old CPI. Ka-ching.

This comes via Lydia DePillis, who’d like to talk about raising the compensation floor, not just cutting the CEO cap back down to size. Good luck with that.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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