Stock option scam

Stock options are a great deal for people running companies. Pay your self lots of money and you'll find yourself taxed at the highest rates or even subject to the AMT. Take a small salary and take stock options, well, you pay less in taxes than your secretary. This is a bad deal for the little people because it allows wealthy people to cheat the system by collecting a paycheck and not being taxed as much as the little guys. I think stock options as salary should be treated as salary and taxed as salary.

Stock options are a bad deal for investors. It's a way to pay people when you don't want to use up your cash. The stock market effectively pays the salaries of those people you give the stock options to and it dilutes the shares of the company. For the company, it is a great deal because it doesn't cost anything when compared to salaries. Companies should be made to declare stock options as "salaries" with the full cost of the stock on their books since they are effectively selling shares in their company on the open market, using the money to buy back the new shares and hand them to people. Funny how selling shares and using that to pay salaries is treated differently from granting stock options since they are effectively the same thing. The only difference is that when you have stock options, you can choose when to cash them in.

Close the loopholes. The companies will be run better and perhaps shareholders will look carefully at the true cost of issuing millions of dollars of options to the CEO.