CEO’s into the Breach?
As the aftermath of the debt ceiling debate continued two CEO’s—Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Warren E. Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway stepped forward with ideas to mitigate the debt.
On Monday Mr. Schultz stepped forward to urge his fellow CEO’s to boycott campaign giving. The story in Bloomberg was Facebooked 3,000 times.
A day earlier Warren E. Buffett in an op-ed piece in The New York Times called on Congress to raise the taxes of wealthy Americans.
Under the headline “Stop Coddling the Super Rich” Mr. Buffett made the case of why taxes should be raised and as expected met with mixed results. There were those on the left who agreed with his argument. Some on the right said there was no reason he couldn’t make a private donation to the I.R.S.
Just over a year ago, Mr. Buffett, along with Bill and Melinda Gates met with great success when he prevailed upon 40 billionaires (you can read the list of who has signed a non-binding pledge to give away half their wealth, a total of $600 billion in all.
Months before Mr. Buffett put his plan into action Kevin Salwen and his daughter Hannah detailed their family’s experiences about living below their means and donating half the money to charity in The Power of Half (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010)
While Mr. Buffett probably wanted to start the conversation (he had previously written for The New York Times about buying stock during the height of the financial meltdown), he hasn’t gotten a lot of traction or buy-in about his latest proposal at this point. It sounds a lot more high minded to give to those in need than to bail out a government in debt.
Whether other CEO’s get on board remains to be seen. While some CEO’s may think one or both ideas have merit, their corporate responsibility is to the shareholders to make money.
