Issued during a period of historically low interest rates--for adjustable-rate mortgages, they clocked in below 4% in 2003--many mortgages allowed buyers to pay only the interest on a loan for a certain period of time, or paydown very little on loan principal.
Because stock ownership, even by large institutional investors, is so widely dispersed, the potential return an investor can get by being an activist shareholder is too low to justify spending his or her time and money on efforts to hold down unnecessary pay and spending.
So I laid out a plan to pay for the American Jobs Act, and then some -- a plan that not only pays for the bill to put folks back to work to raise our growth rate, but to also paydown more of our debt over time.