2010 was a great year, if you happen to be the CEO of a major corporation. USA Today has reported that median CEO pay went up 27%, to $9 million in 2010. Compare this with the average worker, whose pay rose a whopping 2.1%. According to a paper by Professor G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz, "The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options. It was at 411:1 in 2005 and 344:1 in 2007, according to research by United for a Fair Economy. By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe."
This data reinforces my belief that there is something fundamentally broken in our system. As noted by Professor Domhoff, in 2007 the top 1% of American households owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, while only 15% of the wealth was owned by the bottom 80%, who are the workers in the economy. Between 1983 and 2004, 42% of the new financial wealth created in the U.S. economy went to the top 1%, 94% went to the top 20%, while the bottom 80% received only 6%. Think about that. Of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, only 6% went to the working class. We are rapidly turning into a plutocracy (if we're not there already).
During the first Gilded Age, there was a realization that such concentration of wealth was bad for the country. Theodore Roosevelt spearheaded progressive policies to try to rein this in. But in this new Gilded Age, we have one political party that not only is unwilling to help the worker, but is dead set on avoiding anything that could be considered a limitation on the freedom of corporations to do what they want. Where is this generation's T.R.?
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