From the Economic Policy Institute (http://www.epi.org/):
We hear a lot about the top 1 percent and how more and more income and wealth are going to the very richest Americans while working families get left behind. But did you know that the growth of executive compensation was the single largest factor behind the explosion of income for the top 1.0 and top 0.1 percent? How does CEO pay compare to working people, or even to the rest of the top 1 percent?
A new EPI report shows that CEO compensation surged in 2017, with CEOs making 312 times more than a typical worker in the firm’s industry. In fact, the average CEO of a top U.S. firm made $18.9 million last year compared with $62,431 for the typical worker. This puts CEOs of the largest publicly traded companies far above the earnings in the top 0.1 percent of all wage earners, $2.5 million (in 2016).
What this means is that the fruits of economic growth are not going to ordinary workers; they’re going to CEOs whose pay continues to be very, very high and has grown far faster in recent decades than average working people.
While stagnant wages continue to be the greatest challenge facing working families and our economy, it doesn’t have to be this way. The escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1 percent incomes.
It’s critical that our elected officials act to reverse this trend and implement policies that restrain the incomes of the top 1 percent while simultaneously boosting the power of regular workers. Only then will increased productivity and corporate earnings finally result in broadly shared prosperity for all U.S. families.
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