As it turns out, there’s a huge difference between our perception of the wealth inequality in America and reality.
This is freaky!
According to the video, 5,000 Americans were asked how they think wealth is distributed in this country. They then are asked to explain what the ideal distribution would be. Then the video shows what the actual distribution is. … And what they show will shock you.
Four shocking facts from the video:
The top 1% has 40% of all the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80% percent, 8 out of 10 people, only has 7% between them and this has only gotten worse in the last 20-30 years.
While the richest 1% take home take home almost a quarter of the national income today, in 1976, they only took him 9%!
The top 1% has more of the country’s wealth than 9 out of 10 Americans believe the entire top 20% should have.
The average worker needs to work more than a month to make what the CEO makes in one hour.
How is any of this okay? How do we go about fixing something like this?
Thank you to our friends at Upworthy for raising awareness about this important topic!
Photo credit: YouTube, “Wealth Inequality in America”
Deanna – I feel that way too many CEO’s live on the backs of the people under them. They may be able to delegate well. But as far as the real work; that is done below them and sometimes very much underpaid at that.
A lot of the CEOS have no idea of the inner workings of the organization or how it is ran.
The worker bees keep plugging away – while the queen bee sits on her throne in meetings deciding whom to cut next as a result of poor management.
Marlin
Wow Schala, You hit the nail DIRECTLY on the head. Could not have said it better myself!
“Do You Really Believe CEOs Work 380 Times Harder Than Their Average Worker?”
Come’on folks, your income has nothing to do with how hard you work and everything to do with how much value you create and how much of it you can capture.
You can argue the results, but you can’t argue the mechanics.
Because of the results, capitalism sucks, and has very little difference compared to 1700s aristocracy.
Slavery is illegal, but making people homeless because of huge cost of living is legal. Same deal.
The other issue is people being sold a myth that working hard will earn you large amounts of money. No, it won’t, a person working 3 jobs works hard but can still be barely middle class or lower, a celebrity may SHOW UP to an event and earn the year’s wage of the average worker. The disproportionate work to income is beyond a joke. Working hard doesn’t make you rich, being born into wealth, being lucky with finding an idea and working in your business to build it up MAY make you rich (but plenty do the SAME amount of… Read more »
It’s misguided to come at this from the point of view that one’s income/wealth is or ought to be proportionate to how hard one works. Simply put, not all people’s abilities and skills (and therefore value as workers) are equal, regardless of how hard they work. Derek Jeter and Carmelo Anthony probably don’t work any harder than the people who wash their uniforms and clean up their locker rooms after every game. But they, like a CEO, possess exceptionally rare skill sets that make their work product significantly more valuable than that of an equipment manager, factory worker or customer… Read more »
Yeah, pretty much… A lot of these remuneration packages include enormous payments in stock options. Without knowing the source for the stats in the video, it is unclear how much this is in play. Nor is it clear whether these amounts are gross remuneration, or net remuneration after tax, cause those kinds of incomes do attract a little bit of tax. If you think the remuneration package is not grossed up to account for the tax burden, well … Still, its a lot of money. And if you taxed away all of it federally, it still would not make any… Read more »
I’ve said it before, the super income of both team owner and team players should be divided with the home city and added to tax money for that city (hence it returns mostly to the people who go see it). Their skill might be rare, but it doesn’t merit 8 digits/year compensation. They can have a nice retirement based on years served from the city they contributed to. CEOs also don’t merit 8-9 digit wages, and rectors don’t merit 500k + all expenses paid, especially when they claims students “have it easy” and should “pay their way” when the students… Read more »
The problem is paying exorbitant amounts to those rare ducks whilst paying pittance to the other workers. A CEO who earns more than 20x what the average worker makes is beyond a joke. I can understand maybe 5-10X if they are REALLY good but are they really worth 20-380 people? What can they bring to the table that 380 other people cannot? Do they have a super power to stabilize fusion? I don’t mind so much when they get a bonus but for a company that is laying off thousands of workers especially whilst giving out bonus’s to the head… Read more »
Yep Archy it does look pretty sick. This person is making a fortune from decimating the lives of thousands. And that certainly is what it looks like from the outside. I worked for a guy that did just that – and I was his hatchetman. Really, truly. Well, ok, not thousands, just hundreds. This was an outfit that was completely bust. They had cashflow less than their operating costs, they were unprofitable. Their assets were out of date – so much so that their costs were nearly 50% higher than their competitors. They could not re-capitalize because their bank agreements… Read more »
Mandate by law if you layoff large portions of your workforce, you DO NOT GET A BONUS THAT YEAR or the next few years. Bonus should be for those CEO’s who can manage to keep their workers on, not put thousands out of a job. Imagine if the companies had to retrain those they laid off and ensure they get another job, would they find a new way to keep them on?
This is how revolutions start!
Deanna, is there any chance at all we could keep straight the difference between income and wealth? The difference between earned income from services, and income from wealth? To be blunt, asking the typical person about what they think is ideal is pointless – they have such a limited understanding of the system they operate in, that they do not have any idea. Very few have actually seen the operation of capital (wealth as the video has it), and do not realize that it bears NO relationship to what most of us understand as ‘money’. It is a very different… Read more »
These are important facts in this discussion, but I don’t think they diminish the larger point of the video (not sure if that was your goal Rezam). The capital is being concentrated in a smaller and smaller group of people. Economic power, and the other kinds of power you could conceivably buy, is being concentrated in a smaller and smaller group of people. The shareholders hold ultimate power over corporations by definition, CEOs must answer to the shareholders. However the video clearly states that the hyper wealthy 1% also owns fully half of the shares, and the bottom half of… Read more »
Well, I will try again. I have no interest in diminishing the video. It’s a waste of time to try. The headline stat is an AFL-CIO stat drawn, not from a comparison of all CEOS to the workers in their companies, but from 300 CEOs of the S&P500, vs a ‘typical american worker’. The S&P market cap is running about $14 trillion, and the average would be about $28 billion. These are not your typical american corp, these are major multi- nationals. Instead of the 380 x lets use the actual numbers. The comparison is to a CEO income of… Read more »
Prevent tax evasion and tax fraud so that capital doesn’t leave the country without the entire company, and its products, and its workers and everything leaves the country. You pay taxes only based on where the money is made. That would screw the 1%. They might even migrate away, and other more reasonable people would take their place, because economy doesn’t like vaccuum, but lots of people want that rich-guy-seat, even if its less-rich-than-now, it’s still uber rich. The rich didn’t apparently mind pre-Reagan super taxes, did they? They were still rich, and getting richer every year. Trickle-economics never happened… Read more »
“The capital is being concentrated in a smaller and smaller group of people. Economic power, and the other kinds of power you could conceivably buy, is being concentrated in a smaller and smaller group of people.” This is still not so. There is greater amounts of capital in the same hands AND there are smaller amounts of capital in NEW hands. The capital distribution presented is misleading. It does NOT show you how many new seats are at the table. “what are they going to do with that power? How are they going to treat the rest of us? That… Read more »
“As for terrifying – well I’m sorry you feel that way, but what terrifies me is disinvestment and no jobs for my children, no chance for them to have independent lives.” We shouldn’t work to live or live to work, we should work to fulfill whatever it is we are good at. We shouldn’t feel forced to take jobs out of economic desperation, it should never come down to this. I want children of the world to have liveable income, enough food to not starve (and some margin), a roof over their head. A job shouldn’t be a requirement to… Read more »
Well, you may be right Schala. But at the moment, all 3 of my kids are unemployed, and they like to eat too. Although they have mostly given up smoking.
“Ideally we reach that world of leisure (where robotization is taking care of most manual production jobs and we need less workers), not that world of 1984 where we need to conform or die.” In the current capitalist society most people would have no jobs, and super rich would have most wealth and most people would require handouts or die. The superrich will own all of the robots and have enormous levels of power since they don’t NEED others as long as they have access to electricity, resources, etc to keep repairing those machines. You could effectively get to a… Read more »
“Quite frankly the future scares the living shit out of me because in the past we NEEDED lots of people, we still NEED lots of people to mine the resources” In the past this meant enslaving people, because otherwise the were considered too costly to pay. I don’t think the past was that better. The robots should be controlled by a decentralized government, and the super rich taxed at 95% of income and wealth surplus (including actions, options, selling of housing) of everything above 1 million of 2013 dollars. Like in the pre-Reagan era. Super high marginal taxes for the… Read more »
I think currently is probably the best time we’ve had, maybe 10 years ago before the GFC? Though I heard post ww2 was a great time too for the U.S. My main hope is robotics is cheap enough that we can all have our own robots. I got myself a lil RC helicopter for a few hundred bucks, same thing use to cost 1000’s probably in the early days. We might be able to have a family of our own, we buy the robot/s, maintain them, tell them how to work and we get the leisure time. Though TBH I… Read more »
Watch the movie In Time, it really drives the point home.
TV tropes call its subtility about it anvilicious.