One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage ove

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问题     One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages.【F1】Silver medals should certainly be handed out to the many executives and corporate lawyers who were complaining last week about the new Dodd-Frank bill, which includes a rule requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their chief executive and their lowest-level workers. It would be a "logistical nightmare," these titans of industry cried, for firms to compile this information.
    Well, maybe, but if you issue pay stubs, surely you can tally them up.【F2】The real nightmare will be when the public sees the numbers, which will illuminate just how huge the U. S. pay gap has become. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank based in Washington, the average S&P 500 CEO takes home 263 times what his cheapest laborer does. While CEO pay is indeed down from its pre-crisis highs in 2007, it’s still double what it was in the 1990s, and eight times the level in the 1950s.
    Such facts are inevitably followed by the impossible-to-answer question, do they deserve it?【F3】While the corporate world has certainly gotten more complex over the last 50 years, it’s hard to make the case that CEOs themselves have gotten any smarter, or that investors are doing a better job of judging a CEO’s success. Compensation levels are all too often driven by short-term thinking. The CEOs of the 50 firms that laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers did—largely because cutting workers boosts short-term profits and appeals to Wall Street.
    Yet a growing body of academic research suggests that downsizing doesn’t always lead to increased profitability over the longer haul, or even lower costs.【F4】There are many reasons for this, ranging from the fact that companies going into layoff mode often lose their best workers to competitors, to the toll taken on R&D spending, which is what produces the revenue and growth potential of the future.
    While one can argue the merits of layoffs on a company-by-company basis, what’s striking is that the executives who are the most willing to ax workers also seem to be the least likely to tighten their own belts.【F5】If nothing else, it could be the starting point of a conversation in which America’s business leaders explain, to their shareholders and to the wider public, exactly why they need so much money to get the job done.
【F1】

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答案人们当然应该给那些公司的总裁和律师们颁发奖章,上周他们一直在抱怨新的《多德一弗兰克法案》,因为这个法案中有一项规定,要求各个公司公开首席执行官和最底层工人的薪水差距。

解析 本句是一个复合句,句中包含一个由who引导的定语从句,修饰executives and law—yers,而这个定语从句中又包含一个由which引导的定语从句,修饰前面的《多德一弗兰克法案》。本句的主句是被动语态,由于汉语多主动,翻译时应尽量转化成主动形式译出。因此本句中的Silver medals should certainly be handed out应译为:人们当然应该给……颁发奖章。requiring分词结构在句中作a rule的补语。注意disclose不能直译为“揭露,曝露”,而应该根据上下文意译为“公开”。
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