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President Obama today will announce his administration’s new economic stimulus plan. It is expected to include hefty tax-credits and so-called investment incentives for businesses. Paul Krugman has criticized the business tax-cuts as being counter-productive as they will potentially cost the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Meanwhile, a new report shows that many corporations are not investing the money they do have into employment. When industry leaders like Johnson and Johnson and Verizon lay-off thousands of employees the public assumes those companies are in financial trouble. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled, Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession, reveals that greed, more than fiscal responsibility, has motivated huge rounds of lay-offs. The report zeros in on 50 firms it calls “lay-off leaders”. The authors found that 72% of those 50 firms slashed jobs while their companies were not only financially stable, but were reporting positive earnings. Overall the CEO’s of these lay-off leaders took home an average of $12 million each in 2009, with some raking in many millions more. Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg took home over $17 million in 2009, and William Weldon, CEO of Johnson and Johnson, made over $25 million. Overall, the report finds that profits and top-level salaries were prioritized over the jobs of hundreds-of-thousands of Americans.

GUEST: Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-author of the most recent, and 16 previous, IPS reports on executive compensation.

Find out more at www.ips-dc.org and read the entire report online at http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2010