Tax The Rich! A Conference on Why & How

CEO Pay Is Out Of Control

Sarah Anderson discusses CEO Pay at TAX THE RICH! A Conference on Why & How, April 10, 2019.

It is morally unacceptable for CEOs to live in luxury while their employees are barely getting by. It’s also poor economics – we need high consumer demand from a strong middle class to grow. Regardless of how the pie gets split up, workers shouldn’t be scraping by on crumbs.

Thanks to new Dodd-Frank rules requiring corporations to disclose their pay ratios, we have a sense of just how bad it is. CEOs of several leading companies make more than 1,000 times their median employee pay. Workers would need multiple lifetimes to make what their CEOs make in a year. No one needs that kind of money.

We don’t have to accept this. There are ways of ensuring that CEOs don’t collect gigantic paychecks on the backs of workers living in poverty. For example, Portland, OR taxes any corporation whose CEO makes more than 100 times their median worker’s pay, and other state and local governments have considered similar proposals. By passing legislation to “tax the gap” between what CEOs and their workers make, cities, states, and even the country can correct huge imbalances in power and wealth, raise living standards, and make sure we all get a fair piece of the pie.