5/27/18: Back in 2015 a conservative friend got mad when I said Congress should raise the minimum wage. I argued (as proven by math) that the minimum wage had failed to keep up with inflation.
He argued, in hallucinatory fashion, that if the minimum wage
was raised a McDonald’s cheeseburger would cost $5.
What America really needs is a “Whopper Tax.”
Considering how fat most Americans are, including me, my argumentative friend, and the Big Orange Buffoon, you might argue that if a Big Mac cost $5, we’d all be better off in the end. (The rear end.)
At that price we might eat more fruits and vegetables.
Let me be the first to suggest a “Whopper Tax.” It’s a
conservative, “take responsibility for your actions” approach to healthcare.
Why should any in-shape citizen pay higher taxes for healthcare for others if
those others are big tubs of goo? We need to place scales at the entrances of
fast food emporiums and in candy aisles at grocery stores. If you buy a bag of
Reese Pieces at Piggly Wiggly or a Whopper at Burger King, but step on the
scale and you’re obese, then you are the
whopper. Let the federal government impose a “Whopper Tax,” say $1.50 on the
candy or $2 on the burger. These tax dollars can be used to offset the costs of
healthcare in years to come.
Anyway, where was I? Ah, wages!
When it comes to wages, minimum or not, the average worker is faring worse than he or she might have, three or four decades ago. How bad have the pay disparities become? An Obama-era rule helps us form a picture. Under new rules (which the GOP would like to revoke) publicly traded companies must reveal the pay of top executives, compared to the median pay of workers.
Before we continue, this is not a diatribe about capitalism. This is not a call to bring communism to our shores. If you’ve been paying attention, China, almost the last supposed communist nation, has been thoroughly corrupted by money. Party leaders and relatives wallow in cash.
Capitalism, to repurpose a quote from Winston Churchill, is the least bad economic system. (Churchill had said democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the rest.)
That doesn’t mean the current version of capitalism is in
balance.
Consider Stephen Wynn – until recently chief executive of Wynn Resorts – as poster boy for current trends. Wynn’s compensation in 2017 came to $34,522,695, as much as 909 ordinary Wynn employees. Massive economic clout allowed him to donate to Republican candidates and causes ($729,217 to Trump) while simultaneously forcing female workers who wanted to keep their jobs to have sex with his weird, plastic-surgery self. It was what you call a Wynn-win-win for the boss.
Life was good until too many female employees banded together and the pervert got bounced.
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Wynn, left, was good at getting away with abusing women. |
More generally, life is a stupendous pleasure for the men and women at the top. Margaret Georgiadis, former chief executive at Mattel, never had to worry about paying family doctor bills. She took home $31,275,289 in 2017. This equaled the pay of 4,987 Mattel workers. A company spokesperson offered lame apology, explaining the disparity this way: “More than half of Mattel’s worldwide employee base consists of manufacturing-plant workers in Asia and elsewhere, which of course, significantly impacts our median employee pay rate.”
In other words, you shipped jobs overseas and stopped making toys in the U.S. You screwed American workers.
Now you’re screwing workers overseas.
A guy who probably put in some serious overtime to earn his pay would be Frank Bisignano, chief executive at First Data. First Data processes credit-card transactions and Frank is frankly doing fine. In 2015 he did suffer a little, earning a paltry $51.6 million. This year, however, he finally collected a living wage. His take for an average week would be just under $2 million; for the year: $102,210,396. That means Bisignano made as much as 2,028 employees.
How are others at the top of the pyramid faring? Michael Rapino earned $70.6 million, compared to the median pay of Live Nation Entertainment employees ($24,406). That meant a chief executive-to-worker pay ratio of 1 to 2,893. Jeffrey Bewkes at Time-Warner made just under $49 million, as much as 651 cable installers. Steve Easterbrook of McDonald’s took home $21,761,052, as much as 3,101 men and women behind the counters.
But at least Republicans blocked every effort to raise the
minimum wage and a hamburger didn’t cost five bucks.
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