CEO FU
This is pretty damn dickish. If you don’t care about the link, here is a summary: circuit city fired their retail employees that made the most (due to performance-based raises) and then generously rehired them at the “market” rate. They saved less then a million dollars doing this. The CEO makes 2.17 million a year.
A year ago Delphi proposed to the union that they accept 39% pay cuts. The CEO who was hired to Delphi around got a three million dollar signing bonus before this move. MORE than the money that would be saved by this kind of pay cut.
The economic gains of the last few years have only benefited a tiny percentage of the population. The distribution of income in the US looks more like feudalism than anything else. But you know, its probably the union’s fault.
March 31st, 2007 21:20
Income gap is widening, study shows
My favorite part of this is the ridiculous increases for the filthiest rich of the filthy rich:
“While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.
…
The top 1 percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980. The peak was in 1928, when the top 1 percent reported 23.9 percent of all income.
The top tenth of a percent and top one-hundredth of a percent recorded even bigger gains in 2005 over the previous year. Their incomes soared by about a fifth in one year, largely because of the rising stock market and increased business profits.
The top tenth of a percent reported an average income of $5.6 million, up $908,000, while the top one-hundredth of a percent had an average income of $25.7 million, up nearly $4.4 million in one year.”
Average incomes for the bottom 90% of people decrease, while that of the top one-hundreth of a percent increase by $4.4 million (20% of their previous years average income)! Fuck that! Seriously, it’s not like the filthiest filthy are working 20% harder. I’d imagine that its the other way around: the rest of us are working harder and the filthy fuckers are just taking more surplus value from our labor (which produces more surplus value thanks to increases of efficiency due to advances in technology and other means of production). So, what should we non-filthy people do? Seize the means of production from their filthy fat fingers! To the streets!
April 1st, 2007 08:42
that’s why we have income redistribution through the tax system and the welfare state. gross income isn’t the proper way to measure the gap. Instead, we should look to the after-tax gap (which is probably still pretty substantial) and how taxes are spent (does redistribution do anything to mitigate the harshness of the gap?).
admittedly, I think most of what you and steve say is probably true (especially in light of the welfare and tax regime have been scaled back in the past few years).