Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The Main Reason

This is the main reason I'm seriously thinking about doing ANYTHING besides work in corporate america. It is a system designed to fuck the middle class:

"The United States long has had the industrialized world's largest gap in pay between chief executives and blue-collar workers. CEO compensation swelled from 85 times what workers earned in 1990, to 209 times in 1996, and 326 times the following year. In 1999, CEO pay surged to a record 419 times the average worker's wage, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The gap then declined, to 282-to-1 in 2002, before surpassing 300-to-1 the following year, according to the research and advocacy group United for a Fair Economy (UFE).
Comparable figures for other wealthy nations generally do not exceed the double digits.
U.S. CEOs' pay rose 313 percent from 1990 to 2003, UFE said. By contrast, the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index rose 242 percent and corporate profits gained 128 percent.
During the same period, average worker pay rose 49 percent while inflation climbed 41 percent. "

AND

"How big a slap? Forbes magazine has just released its annual CEO pay figures for 2007. The top execs at the nation’s 500 largest companies, says Forbes, averaged $12.8 million last year. They took home nearly a quarter million dollars a week, 407 times the weekly pay average Americans were making at year’s end."

AND

"No other country pays so much. For instance, American chief executives received roughly four times what their Swedish counterparts in comparably sized companies did and 3.1 times that of a Japanese chief at a comparably sized company."

FUCK THAT! I mean seriously, what is the point in even trying to carve out a slice of the American Pie when the odds are this stacked against you. I think that the real kick in the balls is the fact that all that money they get is mainly from stock options, profit from that falls under the capital gains tax, which is at a low 15%, or ~1/2 of the income tax that I pay! So they make 350 times more than me and don't really get taxes on the significant portion of that money.

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