companies like lucent, for example. so as this was going on, you could see that the plans were morphing into profit centers. so they were a source of cash, a source of earnings. now, unfortunately for retirees and employees, there was yet another thing going on at the time. this coincided with a shift in executive pay. ininstead of just giving executives great big salaries, companies were changing to more performance-based for tax reasons. so a lot of executive compensation now was being tied to earnings, you know? if stock went up, so would your bonus. suddenly, executives' pay had a direct connection to earnings. and, of course, executives that were green lighting these moves to cut benefits whether, you know, deliberately or not were boosting their own pay. and we've heard plenty about how pay for executives has gone up so dramatically over the past 15, 20 years. but what was also happening was that as the pay grew, companies were -- executives were deferring it. so companies were, essentially, putting their executiv

lucy has been on the ground following this growing movement so you should follow her on twitter at lucent half an hour for the very latest information. and of course one of the issues the protesters with occupy wall street movement are angry about is that too close for comfort relationship between wall street and washington and never before is that more apparent than with the information from the twenty ten census data it appears there have been some changes in the way we do business here in washington the biggest change is how much business is apparently being done here how much money the city now rakes in and how many people are living large as a result well according to these numbers washington d.c. now has the lowest poverty rate for any not for politan city in the country surpassing even places like tech capital silicon valley california but that's not the whole story so i decided to take a look into these numbers and what they actually mean. and the winner is washington the district of columbia where this house is just one of many immersed in luxury and not for sale but what happens

said they are looking at gross debt so those are large numbers, the numbers that you see for me with lucent debt held by the public. the thing to say though is they divided the world into buckets in a sense, different levels of debt. that doesn't prove that there is some particular tipping point at 90% instead evidence shows that above that level economies tend not to do well. we said in an issue we wrote last year about the risk of a fiscal crisis and other things that we've written we don't that it's possible to identify particular tipping point but there's no doubt that as debt rises, risks a fiscal crises rise. the federal government loses the flexibly to respond to unexpected international films our problems at home because of this them in debt. and we are as i said moving into territory that is unfamiliar to most developed countries, for most of the last half-century. >> in fact as you look around the world, there's a recent report showing the most successful and pro-growth deficit reduction took place in countries that relied chiefly on a steady progress, spending cu cuts. and -- tha