Forum Post: 16% raise versus 3% => Wealth and govermnet bipolarization
Posted 12 years ago on April 6, 2012, 6:45 p.m. EST by greeN0914
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In 2011 the chief executives of the 500 biggest companies in the U.S. got a collective pay raise of 16% last year, to $5.2 billion versus the a 3% pay raise for the average American worker.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/americas-highest-paid-ceos-155504434.html
Here's a link to an article "The Rich Get Richer" that outlines how "New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else - and the desperate need to address this wrenching problem."
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=1b186b87-09b0-411a-af0a-7fe57bc4269b
Further to the above, please also refer to :
radix omnium malorum est cupiditas ...
The majority of most CEO compensation is stock options. The stock market has had it's best gains in a decade their past year so naturally CEO gains are high.
The market is up, companies are hiring, unemployment is falling. Hopefully more good days lie ahead.
and ? what's your point? I'd say that's a good reason to become a Chief Executive. Envy will get you nowhere.
Excellent plan. Let's face it, there is nothing wrong with your idea to make everyone in the economy a CEO. If everyone would just stop turning down those offers to become CEO, nobody would be broke. Sure this defies common sense. But common sense will get you nowhere.
Lol. I just turned down an offer last week to become CEO. It just didn't seem fair.
And the name of the company was surely Dumbass Inc?
Are you following me!
I am flattered.
Yeah I make it a point to read your posts for the sheer humor content.
I'm not worrying about everyone becoming a CEO. That's their business.
So all you do is offer ideas, you don't care how good the idea is or whether it works? lol
what idea have you offered that works?
Here is what would work: Guarantee everyone a job, pay students to go to school, offer 100% mortgages at 0% interest, and allocate income based on hard work.
The number 1 problem in the world, by a very wide margin, is lack of income and people only lack income because the top 3% unfairly take more than they deserve, leaving too little income left over for everyone else.
Since the only economic reason for paying one person more than another is to get people to work hard, the only fair way to allocate income is to limit differences to only what is necessary to get them to do difficult work and give their maximum effort.
Allowing the top 3% to take as much as 50,000 times more income than everyone else is unfair and undeserved because 1) they don't work 50,000 times harder than everyone else, 2) they didn't earn this money from willing consumers in the market, 3) they shouldn't have the power to force the rest of society into poverty or financial struggle, 4) there is no economic justification that requires us to pay them this amount in order for the economy to work well, 5) it makes society undemocratic.
Income should be allocated based on hard work. If someone in the bottom 1% of earners works just as hard as someone in the top 1% of earners, they should get paid the same. Society should work equally well for everyone. That is only fair.
Allocating income in this way would end poverty, end financial struggle, end the number one cause of most of the world's misery, and even end the middle class since it would make everyone wealthy.
I like your idea, and your theory behind your ideas.
highly flawed fantasy.
It only seems like a flawed fantasy to people who lack common sense, who don't realize that they are the 1%'s useful idiot, and who think the answer for everyone who lacks income is to become a CEO.
common sense? central planning has proved to be a failure since the beginning of time. who lacks common sense ? The Soviets guaranteed everyone a job - how did that work out? Incentive is what drives people to achieve not guaranteed safety & security at a miserably low standard of living of which they have no means of escaping.
Look - you do all the right things in life you can still have a comfortable middle class life a standard higher than anywhere else in the world. If you dont do the right things - you have no-one to blame but yourself.
The soviets are a bad example. They had huge wealth at the top. That was why the soviet people revolted.
The people also had little say, not to mention that they threw out of the country all of the engineers and the original revolutionaries who were interested in real socialism, including Trotsky, because Stalin didn't want to give up political power.
But there was not much revolt against communism in 1991. The people did not demand capitalism, it was forced on them. Yeltsin got elected on stabilizing prices not on restoring capitalism. The majority wanted to maintain the soviet union in the referendum that was cast in 1991. But Yeltsin dissolved the union anyway and began restoring capitalism. He had a 7% approval rating at that point and left office with a 2% approval rating. He certainly didn't have a mandate to restore capitalism.
Was there an imbalance of wealth in the old soviet union?
There certainly was income inequality. Some on the Right argued that there was more inequality than in capitalist countries. But it is difficult to get a definitive answer on the extent of the inequality because many of the benefits paid were non-monetary (like free babysitting or discounted state-run houses) which are difficult to accurately measure.
Seems inequality causes unrest in any economic system.
I would say unfair inequality will cause unrest.
If doctors were the highest paid members of society and they earned 5-10 times more than everyone else I don't think there would ever be an Occupy Doctors movement.
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A key strategy the 1% use to turn people like you into their useful idiot is to convince them that the only alternative to them taking most of the wealth that society produces and to wield most of the political power is an evil totalitarian dictatorship.
Rule by the 1% or rule by Stalin are not the only 2 choices society has.
I don't advocate central planning, I advocate that goods and services should be allocated primarily by the market.
Also, people are motivated by income and you don't need to pay people up to 50,000 times more than others in order to motivate them.
Also, guaranteeing everyone a job eliminated poverty in the soviet union and gave everyone a higher standard of living than what they are currently getting from capitalism. After 17 years of capitalism, their economy went nowhere, their 2007 GDP was right back where it was in 1990. In 1990 there was no poverty, today poverty is now rampant and a majority actually want to return to communism.
There were lots of problems with the soviet system - primarily lack of transparency and accountability - but guaranteeing everyone a job was one of the things it got right.
Lastly, 97% of workers earn a below average income. That is not because 97% of workers do the wrong thing. It is because most of the income they produce is unfairly taken by a few people at the top which they have no control over.
They have no control over how much Mark Zuckerberg gets paid or Bill Gates or Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Eli Manning. And the more they take, the less there is for everyone else.
If income was allocated fairly, the economy would work well for everyone, not just the few celebrities and entrepreneurs who got lucky in the market or who got born into the right family.
You are brainwashed. You should expand your understanding of the world beyond the slogans the 1% are conning you with. They are stealing your money and convincing you they have a right to steal it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullibility
Prove it. ;-)
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