For instance, you’ll hear a lot from liberals about how the executives at health insurance companies are overpaid and shouldn’t be making that much while people suffer. Of course, they ignore the facts of profit margins and actual compensation package details when making these claims.  But they are liberals so for them using facts is me having too high of an expectation. As Trying To Grok has noted in a couple posts, you’ll never hear anything from liberals for the government to tax, regulate or engineer the market-dictated salaries or profits of Democrat-aligned companies such as Google. Hmmm, funny how that goes.

But let’s take a look at who’s making what in these industries. For the purpose of this example I’ll use Cigna since they are a major company in the health insurance market that’s come under fire during the topic of healthcare reform.

First, what were the salaries of the CEOs of Cigna vs. Google.

Edward Hanway, CEO Cigna -   2008 Total Compensation: $12,236,740 (including a base salary of $1,142,885)

Eric Schmidt, CEO Google – 2008 Total Compensation:  A base salary of $1; and other compensation of $508,763; Oh, and let’s not forget his stock options in Google which have allowed him to amass $5.5 BILLION in his past compensation package of 12.5 million shares.  Schmidt currently no longer accepts stock options in Google, but he’s set as one of the world’s richest men.

It’s not that Hanway hasn’t amassed some degree of wealth over the years as Cigna’s CEO. The last few years his compensations have been $22 million in 2007 and $15.2 million in 2006.

But the issue is IF you’re going to start taxing executive pay, which executives do you tax? What industries do you tax – the ones that accrue the most wealth from the economy? Who gets to make those taxation classification decisions? Why do they get to make those decisions? And since those decisions will be subjective in manner anyways, isn’t that a reason for them not to be made at all (and thus salaries shouldn’t be engineered by the government)?

I mean if we just look at the years between 2006 – 2008, CEO Schmidt of Google has a wealth that far surpasses even the majority of companies in this world. He certainly seems like he can afford to be taxed more on his wealth more so than Hanway.

But a liberal may say Cigna profits too much from their own industry. Well, what about market share – shouldn’t that show how much Cigna is really the one taking America to the cleaners. Ummm, not so much.

Google has a near majority in some of the services it provides. In the industry of Search Engine Marketing, Google owns around 70% of the SEM market share. SEM is roughly around a $20 billion industry in terms of revenue, set to move upwards of $26 – $30 billion by 2013.

Cigna on the other hand covers around 11.7 million people with its health insurance plans. If you figure 165 million people are currently under a form of private insurance, 11.7 million of those people equate to around 7% of the industry market share.

And to those liberals who say that healthcare is a right. Well, Cigna doesn’t offer healthcare. It offers a risk policy aka insurance. And a service of providing an insurance policy should not be held to a higher moral ground in service retention than a search engine’s services. Sorry, I have a heart – I just don’t let it bleed for unnecessary, illogical sentiments.

Also, let’s look at net profit margins to see how much of America’s hard-earned dollars is being hoarded between Cigna vs. Google:

For 2008, Cigna’s net profit margin was 1.51% (profiting only $292 million out of $19.1 billion in revenue)

And guess what Google’s was – 19.39% (profiting more than $4.3 BILLION out of $21.8 BILLION in revenue)

Gee, it sure seems like Google is a dominant monopoly with more greed to be taxed. 70% vs. 7% market share? 1.51% vs. 19.35% profit margins? Makes someone wonder why liberals are fussing so much over companies like Cigna when they could get more $$ for their tax out of companies like Google.

When certain Presidents talk about “the best economists around” I’d have more faith in just their words that defend their economic policies if I knew they were referring to great men like Milton Friedman and not an economist hack like Keynes.

So the next time somone is complaining about capitalism, corporate greed, the myth of the wealth gap or the failed 40-year war on poverty, just direct them to this clip and ask them to show you an example of an economy where their false utopia of fairness exists.