Recent polls have shown that the American people are starting to realize that the Republicans have stacked the odds against them economically -- that they have tilted the economic playing field in this country to favor the rich and hurt almost everyone else. The GOP will tell you that when the rich (and corporations) prosper, everyone prospers -- because the rich will share their new wealth with everyone else (through a "trickle-down" process).
This has never been true, and it's not true now. Thanks to the relaxed regulations put into effect by the Republicans, the rising productivity in this country is no longer shared with workers. It is hogged by owners and management to such an extent that worker wages are actually falling (thanks to inflation eating away at stagnant wages). While the rich are getting richer, everyone else is getting poorer.
And nowhere is that more true than in the restaurant industry -- especially the chain restaurants owned by the giant corporations. Note the chart above from the Economic Policy Institute. It shows that while restaurant workers in many of these giant chains still work for the minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), the CEO's of those corporations make about 721 times as much as those minimum wage workers (or about $5,227.25 an hour). And while the workers in those corporations watch their pitifully low wages continue to be eat up by inflation, those CEO's are seeing their already exorbitant salaries continue to rise.
This is not just ludicrous, but also egregiously unfair. How can those corporate executives (or anyone else) possibly justify their outrageous salaries, or justify continuing to pay their workers a poverty wage? They can't. A significant majority of the American people want the minimum wage raised to a livable level (at least $10.10 an hour). That should be done immediately, and the minimum wage should be tied to the rate of inflation (so we don't find ourselves in this same mess in a few years).
But we should consider going further. We should think about capping the amount of money any CEO can make (at a certain level compared to the lowest paid worker in that corporation). This would insure that productivity is once again shared by all in a particular corporation (since executive pay could not be raised without also raising the pay for other workers). I have no problem with company executives making a very nice salary, but 721 times the wage of a worker is outrageous and simply cannot be defended. No other country has such a lop-sided pay scale, and neither should the United States.
