>but CEO's who make hundreds of millions while workers make minimum wage are OK.
>
>So, you think that the janitor should make as much as the CEO? Business owners deserve to make the money that they do because they are the ones that took the risk. If a business fails, it is the business owner that loses everything he or she invested in it. The workers only lose their jobs.


How do you get from Bill's comment to any suggestion that the janitor should make as much as the CEO? The issue is that CEO pay keeps going up while worker pay has been pretty much stagnant.

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/ceo-to-worker-pay-ratio_n_3184623.html:

Today Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times regular workers on average, Bloomberg found. The ratio is up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950.

From http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/:

From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.

That's almost two orders of magnitude. Do you think CEOs produced 100 times more value for their companies than the workers did in the same period. I don't think anyone here thinks that CEOs and janitors should be paid the same. But I think a lot of us think that CEO compensation has risen at an absurd rate compared to the pay of large group of people who actually produce whatever it is that the company sells.

I also reject your premise that CEO's are necessarily business owners. In large companies, they're usually not. They're just hired guns and they're not taking any personal financial risk.

Tamar