What Kind Of Society Allows This?

Robert Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary and Professor of Public Policy at UC-Berkely, posted on Wednesday May 7 the message below on Facebook (link added):

"According to annual rankings published yesterday by Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine, hedge-fund manager David Tepper took home $3.5 billion last year. Assuming he worked 40 hours a week and went on a two-week vacation, that came to $1,750,000 an hour. $1,750,000 an hour is enough money to hire 241,380 workers at the nation’s current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. It’s enough to lift the wages of 538,461 minimum-wage workers (roughly one out of every seven of today's minimum-wage workers) to $10.40, which the President and Democrats are seeking as the new minimum wage. It’s enough to hire 103,734 workers at the nation’s median hourly wage of $16.87."

Pause for a moment and let that statistic sink in: $1.75 million per hour. That was not per month or per week. It was per hour. Using an average annual salary of $36,587 for workers in the USA,  it would take an average-paid worker almost 48 years -- your entire working career -- to make what Tepper made in one hour. Something is very wrong.

Reich also wrote in his Facebook post:

"I’m not suggesting Tepper do any of these things, but I can’t help wondering how he possibly can spend $1,750,000 an hour. I also wonder what kind of society is it that won’t raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour but gives hedge-fund managers earning well over a million dollars an hour a special tax break allowing them to treat their income as capital gains subject to the lower capital-gains rate instead of ordinary income?"

Good question: what kind of society allows this type of senior executive pay while at the same time refuses to raise the Federal minimum wage for the lowest paid workers? Remember, the minimum wage doesn't affect all workers; just the lowest paid workers.

The Federal minimu wage rate has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. Meanwhile, elected officials in Congress get automatic cost-of-living increases (COLA) to their pay. (Their COLAs are in addition to what appears to be legalized "insider trading" for member of Congress.) Is that fair? If COLAs are good for a few, they are good for everyone.

Are these your values? These are not my values, and I doubt that they are your values either. These don't seem like Christian values either. Yet, we've elected government officials that have crafted and voted for laws that allow this to continue.

And, it's not only income inequality. It's wealth inequality, too. Some of the problems with wealth inequality (link added):

"Wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack. Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized... By the time you get to 2010, US inequality, according to Piketty’s data, is quantitatively as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the 20th century..."

This is a mugging of the middle class. This is a mugging of the American Dream. This is a war on both the middle class and the poor. Can you imagine making $1.75 million an hour? I can't imagine anyone being worth that much. Can you?

What type of society allows this? What type of person denies others the benefits they enjoy? One possible explanation: academic studies have found that right-wing conservatives, and the rich CEOs they support, are often sociopaths.

Learn more about income inequality, the six principles of the new populism, the film Inequality For All, and take action. Consumers worldwide are slowly waking up to the issues. For higher wages and more rights in the workplace, fast food workers will protext on May 15 in 150 cities and 30 countries.