Hawaii’s World
A survey says the average U.S. corporate executive earned $10.6 million last year including stock options, the average production worker $29,000. Growing disparity in
wealth isn’t healthyThis is a 419 to 1 disparity, 10 times the disparity in 1980.
Such rich-poor vulgarity is something we tend to associate with the Third World. It is not healthy for America.
People who earn such wealth, I fear, often lay it all to their own skills and savvy -- with hardly a tip of their hats to the free enterprise system that made it possible or the technology that makes mass marketing, even global marketing, now commonplace.
We need look no farther than professional sports to get a clue as to why it is happening. Player A signs a contract for $1 million, an amount made possible only by audiences expanded dramatically beyond the stadium by TV.
Player B, a competitor with a good ego, refuses to sign for less. He gets $1.5 million.
Soon the drive to use pay as a way of confirming one's ego goes another step higher for Player C. On and on. Ever skyward until guys who would be happy to play the game they love for $100,000 under normal circumstances have racheted up the tabs unendingly. Why? Primarily to get the ego reinforcement of getting more than the other guys.
Corporate executives are no better, more likely worse since they help play this game by sitting on each other's salary-setting committees as "disinterested" members from outside the company.
Lawyers find judges, who were lawyers once themselves, willing to approve fees that also rachet skyward as percentages of ever-higher mass settlements -- witness the tobacco cases.
This vulgarity is softened at times by the likes of Bill Gates giving $1 billion for scholarships for minorities and prom-ising to share still more of his $90 billion estimated worth... or by an employer who startles his 550 workers by giving them $128 million of the $422 million he got when he sold the company they helped build.
Other softeners include the creation of charitable foundations of all types, many of them able to distribute wealth more wisely than government might if it taxed it all away.
But these are not enough. Inefficient as government may be we need to use it to strengthen the safety nets under the common people of our rich, rich country.
We need to make Social Security stronger, give fuller Medicare coverage to the elderly and ensure adequate health insurance coverage for all. Somehow we must get around the gimmick that encourages employers to hire workers for less than 20 hours a week to avoid providing them health benefits.
In welfare we have done a wise thing by moving away from the concept of "entitlements" that encouraged free-loading by the able-bodied and more babies by unmarried mothers. But we still owe adequate support to the rest of those who somehow haven't been able to fend for themselves in this pretty ruthless world.
Only when the people at the bottom of the economic pile are taken care of can we sit back and enjoy the fantastic wealth our society now makes possible for our upper classes.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.