By Mike Scilingo

John K. Galbraith said: “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”

The average CEO pay at about 10.54 million is 344 to 400 times higher than the typical employees pay. This is the old robber baron policy of that funnels wealth up rather than having it more equitability and morally along class lines.

From TOO MUCH a few facts. “The 20 U.S. financial firms that have received the most bailout dollars from taxpayers awarded their top five executive officers, in the three years through 2008, pay packages worth a combined $3.2 billion. These 100 financial executives, on their way to driving the U.S. economy off a cliff, averaged $32 million each. One hundred U.S. workers making the 2008 annual average wage would have to labor over 1,000 years to make as much as these 100 executives made in three.”
America’s Bailout Barons, the latest Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report, September 2, 2009

The greed hurts everyone even non-employees. In 1982 according to Forbes, an entrepreneur only needed a little more than 100 million to get on the list of the Forbes 400. By 2008 that same entrepreneur would need at least 1.3 billion to be in the top 400. In other words in the last twenty years so much wealth has been transferred to the few at the top that 100 million is now considered chump change.

It gets worse, Congressional reports state that widespread tax avoidance tricks, like off-shore banks that don’t report accounts the IRS, have cost taxpayers more than 2 billion per year. Couldn’t that 2 billion be used to lower your property tax or give all teachers a pay raise especially those that teach special education?