Top pay has been found to bear little or no relation to company performance, but even if it did, isn’t the performance of a company dependent on the work and well-being of all its staff?
Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.
If the concept of the Big Society is to become a reality, so that people come to know and take more care of each other, income differences must surely be reduced.
I don’t often agree with His Grace, but this time, I do……in spades! The situation here is every bit as bad as it is in the UK, and there are no signs of it ever improving. It is absolutely criminal that differences such as that which he so ably describes are allowed to continue. The fat cat rich should be ashamed of themselves.
But they aren’t are they?
If someone makes $300K and I only make $30K, that’s a $270K gap. Assume both our incomes double over a dozen years. Inflation or whatever, it doesn’t matter. That someone’s now making $600K and I’m making just $60K. The gap between us has become $540K.
How am I worse off because the gap is much wider than a dozen years earlier? At its root is this not all a problem of [b]envy?[/b]
Bart
The problem is that the wealthy are getting richer, and the rest of us are not. It’s not the gap per-se. It’s more along the lines of the guy who made a million bucks ten years ago as a corporate executive is statistically likely making upwards of three times that today, in the same job. Whereas the full time employee working the floor in the factory for the last ten years is probably making the same money or perhaps even less if adjusted for inflation. And he has probably had his benefits reduced or eliminated.
Obviously I am painting with a broad brush here. There are certainly exceptions. But this is the pattern we have seen not just over the last ten years, but really over the last thirty or so. Income and compensation for the top 1% has exploded, in some cases by obscene percentages while the wages and earnings of the middle and working class have generally failed to even keep pace with the increases in the cost of living.
I have no use for socialism. But that’s not the same thing as saying that just because you can get away with something that it’s right and moral.
Amen, Bart.