The gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has been growing for decades. Wages and benefits for ordinary workers have stagnated or declined while rewards to supervisors, CEOs, and other powerful workers have skyrocketed. The following article looks at some of the resulting problems and how these might be solved.
Why Billionaires Should Pay for the Jobless Recovery
By unleashing capital and finance we were supposed to get an enormous investment boom in real goods and services. Instead we got a fantasy finance boom as Wall Street marketed derivatives to those with excess capital.
We also got the biggest crash since the Great Depression.
Perhaps the most dramatic measure of our emerging billionaire bailout society is seen by comparing compensation for the top 100 CEOs and to that of average workers (the 100 million or so non-supervisory production workers). In 1970 the ratio was 45 to 1. By 2006 it was 1,723 to one. (The Looting of America p.167)
Three Questions
1) What do you think is a fair range between the minimum and maximum payment for work? 1-10? 1-100? 1-1000? Something else?
2) How do you feel about the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, and from rich to poor?
3) What are some things that we as citizens can do to repair the wrecked economy?
{ 0 comments… add one now }