As to CEO pay, it has risen from about 20 times greater than that of their companies’ median worker in the 1960s to well more than 200 times that today.
And when it comes to billionaires—of whom we have roughly 1,300—today they control between 15 and 20 percent of all Americans’ wealth. Fifty years ago, there were so few American billionaires that they controlled less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
And 50 years ago, we should never forget, Americans could afford to buy homes (the median age of first-time homebuyers was at least a full decade younger than it is today), go to college (at most public colleges and universities, tuition was still either free or nominal), and purchase prescription drugs. In other words, the relationship between an economy dominated by billionaires and an economy of broadly shared prosperity is, in a word, inverse.
Which is why the Democrats’ current tax reform efforts seek to do no more than update our taxes to account for the massive upward redistribution of wealth and income that the nation has experienced over the past half-century. While billionaires (who, The New York Times reported earlier this week, accounted for 19 percent of all the contributions to House, Senate, and presidential campaigns in 2024) are shrieking at the injustice of all this, the public, happily, supports raising taxes on the richest Americans. Indeed, a range of recent polls show that a majority of Republicans favor raising taxes on the rich.
I note, by the way, that in the wake of the state of Washington’s tax hike, Starbucks exec and union-buster Howard Schultz has said he’ll move to low-tax (and correspondingly low levels of public education) Florida, where he’ll join his fellow billionaire refugees from other blue states on private islands and in well-defended enclaves where they won’t have to suffer the indignity of interaction with normal Americans (excepting, of course, their servants).
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