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Does Your Average American Know He or She is Being Stolen Blind by the Upper Echelons ?

By Andis Kaulins

The Great Debate, a blog by Bernd Debusmann at Reuters, has some interesting statistics on the ever-widening gap between salaries at the American business top as compared to those of normal American workers. Debusmann writes in In American Crisis, Anger and Guns:

"There?s less wealth to spread around now as trillions of dollars has evaporated with increasing speed in the deepening crisis. In housing alone, more than $5 trillion has vanished. The gap between rich and poor, a gap of Third World proportions, has not changed. A full-time worker, on average, made $37,606 last year, considerably less than in 1973, adjusted for inflation.

While CEOs made 45 times as much as workers in 1973 they make more than 300 times as much today, according to Holly Sklar, author of ?Raise the Floor, Wages and Policies that Work for All of US."

That figure is of course exaggerated, unless you are comparing only the CEOs at the very top in Fortune 500 companies and the like, who of course are making millions of dollars per year. I have never been sure just quite what for, but people are paying them that kind of absurd money to be company figureheads under the mistaken assumption that only CEOs who get millions can make millions. It is a rather foolish idea, not supported by empirical studies.

In any case, one of the truly serious problems in America is that a great mass of the population really does not know what is going, thinking that everything is hunky-dory just because they are in America, and not realizing that they are increasingly being stolen blind by the upper strata of society, who have been taking an increasingly larger share of the pie for themselves, and leaving less and less of that same pie for the vast majority of Americans.

We do not know what the solution to this confounded situation is. As long as people in America fail to realize that they have a problem, it will not be solved.

Full post as published by LawPundit on March 25, 2009 (boomark / email).