Two hundred and eighty-eight to one

Our country continues to degenerate toward levels of inequality more associated with the France of Louis XVI than with a modern free and democratic society.  This report at Common Dreams has the latest, with many infuriating details; the standout figure for me is that the median ratio of CEO pay to worker pay is now 288-to-1.  That's up substantially from 254-to-1 just a year ago, and represents a fundamental change compared to the 20-to-1 which prevailed in the 1960s, when middle-class workers made enough money relative to prevailing costs to buy a house and put three or four children through college on a single income.

Inflation-adjusted incomes for most US workers have been almost stagnant for about forty years (that covers my own entire working life) even as productivity has shot up.  How is that possible?  The richest one percent, the class that includes most CEOs and major stockholders at their corporations, skimmed off the extra wealth all those millions of workers produced, in the form of ever-more-obscene pay packets, bonuses, stock options, and golden parachutes.  While more and more ordinary Americans now struggle to get by from paycheck to paycheck, and could hardly dream of owning a house or putting children through college (or, in some cases, of affording children at all), the parasite class lives in a world of yachts and private jets and multiple palatial houses, as far removed from the world you and I inhabit as the life of Louis XVI was from that of the average French peasant of his time.

Is there any sense in which these people are earning all that money?  It is absurd to even ask the question.  Of course the median CEO is not working 288 times harder than the median American worker.  Most of them would suffer a complete breakdown if they had to labor through one ordinary work day of a fast-food employee or Amazon warehouse worker.  I'm frankly skeptical that top corporate executives do anything really vital at all.  I have worked at companies where the CEO or CFO position was vacant for six months or a year while an exhaustive search was conducted for the "right" person.  The business of the company continued on, not visibly affected at all by the vacancy of the august executive seat.  If the receptionist quit, they brought in a temp the same day, because that job actually does something and they couldn't make do without it.

One could also compare the US to other successful market economies like Japan and European nations, where the pay ratio is twenty or thirty to one, not 288 to one.  Is the median US CEO really a dozen times harder-working or more effective than the median Japanese or European CEO?  It's laughable.

The richest of the rich, people like Bezos and Musk, are inevitably the most visible to society because the media follow their antics as if they were some sort of celebrities.  They have wealth in the tens or hundreds of billions, yet it's painfully obvious that they are not unusually skilled or intelligent.  On the contrary, many of them are barely competent (see Musk's floundering at Twitter and his constantly-exploding cars and rockets), and so socially inept that they could barely survive if they were forced to live as ordinary people, without wealth and privilege to shield them from the consequences of their behavior.  In most cases, they were just born lucky and/or got in on the ground floor of some emerging technology or business model which would have appeared and developed with or without them, then built up their wealth to obscene levels by exploiting workers to the absolute limit of what the law would allow.

I do recognize, by the way, that there are some very wealthy people who truly did earn what they have.  Artistic creatives like JK Rowling or Taylor Swift genuinely did create things which could not have existed without them, things tens of millions of people found pleasurable enough to pay for.  They did not get where they are today by grinding down and underpaying vast numbers of sweatshop employees who do all the actual work, nor by lobbying politicians to give them unfair advantages over competitors, nor by cozy arrangements of sitting on each other's boards of directors and voting each other ridiculous salaries and stock options.  They represent honorable success on the old textbook model of how a free market is supposed to work.  But they are not typical of most of the one percent.

There's no mystery about how to fix this problem.  If we could return marginal tax rates to where they were in the fifties and sixties, when the economy was booming steadily and the rising tide truly did lift all boats, and if we could impose wealth taxes of similar impact, then we could begin to redistribute these monstrous mountains of wealth back to those who actually created them.  It just isn't politically possible, because we now have one party which is determined to cut and cut and cut what rags of a social safety net we have and grind down half the American people to Third World levels of degradation and desperation rather than rescind any of the endless tax cuts which now have many billionaires paying a lower effective tax rate that the typical waitress or secretary -- and another party which is itself half captured by the one percent and most of whose leaders are too timid to talk bluntly and honestly about the problem.

The new wave of labor activism we see today is the most promising development on the horizon, but to really change the direction of the country, that movement will need to grow large and strong enough to dominate the Democratic party and transform it into a true party of the working class, something it has not been for generations, and get rid of all the identity politics and gun-grabbery and woke-ism and general distraction and clutter that bog the party down and make it culturally toxic to vast regions of the country.  It will be a gigantic task.