As Memphis City Council gets ready for its budget wrap-up this week, we have only one request: no more Fred Smith analogies.
Because of our broken tax structure, there are no easy answers for the Council, only a menu of poor options. That said, the tendency to justify pay cuts (which are crudely symbolic) and the elimination of next year’s pay raises (which are prudently overdue) by citing Fred Smith’s reduction in his salary as FedEx founder is really getting old.
The relevance between Mr. Smith’s salary and any of the 6,000 workers in City of Memphis is non-existent – unless the employees are secretly getting stock options as well.
Come to think of it, maybe City Council should set up the equivalent of public stock options. They could do it by setting up a system where high-performing employees get special payment options. Now, it’s a system of disincentives, dragging everyone down to the same level and sending the message that excellence matters little. Best of all, something like a stock options approach would require city government to set up the kind of performance-based system that could truly shake up the public’s business in City Hall.
Now that would be something worth quoting Fred Smith about.
