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While I absolutely understand and sympathize with what you are saying, the issue cannot be analyzed by simply comparing executive pay to that of the lowest paid employees. I know it is popular to make these comparisons, I get it, one gets a sense of righteousness from discussing things in those terms. However, these comparisons make no sense at all. Wage scales are what they are for a reason. Simple example, in the US an engineer might graduate with somewhere between $100K and $300K US in student loans. That, right there, starts to impose a baseline on what someone can reasonably earn in order for it to be worth it to have that job. Just like a business isn't going to exist to just break even, people tend not to work just to break even. Everyone has to make a profit. To that you start adding professional and personal necessities and you might quickly realize that $150K a year living in Los Angeles might very well be equivalent to 1/2 or 1/5 of that salary elsewhere in the world. I'll give you another simple example: It costs my family $1200 per month for healthcare. It used to be $600 per month. Then Obamacare was instituted --under the laughable "Affordable Care Act"-- and our healthcare tripled to $1800 US per month. We eventually moved to a $1200 per month plan where we accept greater risk and higher costs. I did the math, we have to spend somewhere in the order of $25K in a year before our health insurance really starts paying for things. In other words, context is always important in judging how much people get paid. An executive that is responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue should make enough money to reflect the degree of responsibility he or she has. If they don't do their job, hundreds of people lose their jobs. You simply can't compare executive pay to that of a warehouse worker who is operating at an entirely different level of responsibility and accountability. The problem isn't pay scales. The problem is the overall cost structure, which starts at artificially forced costs --be it wages or regulatory-- imposed in complete violation of free market principles. Here's an example of these costs, something I learned about a couple of decades ago and just astounded me. In Los Angeles County (for those outside the US, the region where the city of Los Angeles is located) we have a tax called "Los Angeles County Business Property Tax". What is this? Well, to put it in simple terms, look around your office. The County of Los Angeles makes businesses pay taxes on everything you see: Your desk, your computer, your printer, fax machine, chair, table, lights, trash can, even any improvements you may have made to your building (dividers, painting, electrical, etc). LA County makes you pay a tax on every physical product the company owns. FOR FUCKING EVER. This is some of the context that is missed from most of these conversations and the kinds of things only people who have to deal with them would know. As is always the case, life is a complex multivariate problem that is never well represented by a single simple variable. |