Skipper Sees Another Year of 'Tough Sledding' for Big Tech

9. What do you make of the push to tax options?

Whether we tax options is less significant in the long run than it's being given credit for. You can see what's going on: FASB has proposed taxing options so that they can declare victory on an issue and deflect attention from their own guilt.

Regulators love this thing because it appears to be a way to help balance budgets and all that stuff. The reality is: It's not the issue. It wasn't the problem. They'll do this, declare victory and move onto some issue like housing. And they'll leave behind this incredible mess and pretend like they've taken care of securities regulation. That's nonsense.

The reason why you don't want to tax options is very straightforward. Thirty years ago, we viewed the economy in terms of labor and management: Management was the owners; labor worked. Thanks to Silicon Valley and the broad distribution of options that accelerated in the late 1980s, everyone's an owner. It's really democratic. If you tax options, you're not going to cut the amount of options that the management team gets because they hand out the options. You're going to cut the options that they give out to everyday people -- it's less democratic.

I don't care if that's inconvenient for the accountants. Deal with it! But this will result in more pro forma accounting, because no two companies will do it the same way.

This whole pursuit of analysts is silly. Did some analysts do things that were really wrong? I suspect they did. Was that really the core of the problem? You must be kidding. When those guys touted stocks up $100 a day, people loved them. The people who hung around the party too long now want to blame everybody but themselves. The analysts are easy people to pick on. The idea that investors didn't know that analysts were being paid by brokerage firms who did investment banking is silly. They weren't paying anything for the research; why did they think it would be unbiased?

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