Washington Post Special Report: Breakaway Wealth

In Harvard, Il, this house costs $82,000:



http://www.homes.com/Real_Estate/IL/City/HARVARD/

I'll bet $23.00 per hour goes pretty far.

 

Yes, and the sales taxes the CEO paid for his Rolls and his yacht were deductible, too, in those days.

When Reagan slashed the marginal rates, he also slashed tons of deductions.

Nobody paid 90 (or 70) percent then. Not even close.

And one thing you MUST remember is that at these levels of wealth, most income comes from capital gains, which were taxed at a high of 35 percent in 1974 and were lowered to 20 percent by 1982. What you do to the "marginal income tax rate" means nothing to these people, because so little of their income is "salary" that is subject to these higher rates.

 

The reason jobs are being outsourced is because the labor unions in this country have made labor too expensive. the CEOs have a responsibility to their shareholders. If they can either pay a union member in the United States $23.00 an hour, plus benefits, plus deal with the headaches of the union making the workers call an electrician to change a light bulb and call a custodian to clean up a mess on the floor...or pay some company in Korea who hires people for $4 an hour to do the same work? And are THRILLED to have the job.

The labor unions have outlived their usefulness and are a big part of why manufacturing in the country is dying. It costs so much money to run a union factory that it no longer makes economic sense.

 

Maybe we need a bunch of CEOs from Southeast Asia who will do the job for $500k.

 

The Wikipedia entry for Harvard, IL gives these figures based on the 2000 census:

The median income for a household in the city was $44,363, and the median income for a family was $48,087. Males had a median income of $30,578 versus $23,750 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,253.

It also notes this:

Motorola opened a 1,500,000 square feet (139,000 m2) mobile telephone manufacturing and distribution facility on Harvard's north side in 1997. The plant employed more than 5,000 at its peak. However, a combination of factors, including a significant decline in Motorola's business in the early 2000s, compelled the company to shutter the facility in 2003.

So, I'd imagine the Dean employes probably felt pretty good about their jobs before the Washington Post reporter showed up to tell them they were victims.

 

You have a fair point. But should Americans have to settle for making $3 a day like their counterparts in Vietnam do? Or even half of that $23 per hour example given before? Especially when the cost of living in the United States is many times what it is in Vietnam?

And remember, it's not just the unionized factory workers who are seeing their jobs get outsourced. It's customer service representatives. It's also the computer programmers and engineers and scientific researchers who aren't unionized. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on on getting doctorates in cutting edge fields yet can't get jobs because the CEO can now outsource that highly-skilled job to someone in India with a PhD for a fraction of the cost of having that person on their own staff in the United States.

 

It's the price you pay for a civil society.

Like I said on the second post of this thread, which car is better? The one with the super-souped up engine with flat tires, rusty body and muffler falling off? Or the one with a nice, well-maintained engine with good tires, a good body and a muffler that works?

 

Ah, the "blame the unions" canard.

 

IF I CAN'T BE RICH, NO ONE SHOULD! CHANGE THE LAWS TO SATISFY MY SPITE!

 

Who said anything about being rich? I'd think most of us here would just be satisified if the CEO made a million or two while providing solid middle class wages for the majority of workers instead of making $10 million while shipping jobs overseas to workers making $3 a day.

 

THERE SHOULD BE A LIMIT TO WHAT ANY AMERICAN CAN MAKE! NATIONAL SALARY CAP!

 

I don't have a problem with people getting paid what a fair market will bear, be it a lot or a little.

Unfortunately, CEO pay is no longer a fair market. There's a ton of profits being made, and owners (stockholders) are absentees, so the only people left to decide what chunk of those profits should go to executives is the executives. Of course they have a skewed value of their own worth.

If you let the janitors decide how much janitors are worth on the free market, we'd have multi-millionaire janitors.