How CEOs are getting richer at your expense

<="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/06/07/2121581/first-quarter-of-2013-saw-largest-wage-drop-ever/">Americans are recording the largest drop in wages ever while the average CEO received $14.1 million in combined pay and stock options last year.  At the same time, <="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/06/26/2220511/americans-paycheck-to-paycheck/">three-quarters of Americans didn’t have enough money for a basic emergency fund.  The <="http://www.epi.org/">Economic Policy Institute <="http://www.epi.org/files/2013/ceo-pay-2012-extraordinarily-high.pdf">reports:

From 1978 to 2012, CEO compensation measured with options realized increased about 875 percent, arise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 5.4 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.

These findings support what we’ve known all along: trickle-down economics <="http://teamsternation.blogspot.com/2013/02/arthur-laffer-worst-economist-in-us-is.html">are a cruel joke. A third of Americans, over 10 percent more than in 2008, say <="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/09/10/a-third-of-americans-now-say-they-are-in-the-lower-classes/">they are lower-middle and lower class. <="http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/06/13-facts-higher-education">Income inequality is rapidly increasing and <="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chuck-collins/helping-the-kids-wealthy-_b_3354529.html">the chances of your kids ending up better off than you are rapidly decreasing, no matter how hard they work.  

The fact that <="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/26/congrats-ceos-youre-making-273-times-the-pay-of-the-average-worker/">CEO pay is more than 270 times more than the average workerisn’t a shock. 

Turns out, even for one-percenters, CEOs are being paid ridiculous amounts:

Over the last three decades, CEO compensation grew far faster than that of other highly paid workers, those earning more than 99.9 percent of other wage earners.  CEO compensation in 2010 was 4.70 times greater than that of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, a ratio 1.62 higher (a wage gain roughly equivalent to that of 1.6 high wage earners) than the 3.08 ratio that prevailed over the 1947-1979 period.

That’s right.  CEOs still make more money comparatively than even other really, really rich people.   Too bad <="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/06/07/2121581/first-quarter-of-2013-saw-largest-wage-drop-ever/">their nice bonuses doesn’t extend to your paycheck.

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