RE: "They'll just raise prices if thy raise the minimum wage."
April 14, 2014 at 11:38 am
(This post was last modified: April 14, 2014 at 11:42 am by Mudhammam.)
(April 14, 2014 at 11:15 am)Heywood Wrote:(April 14, 2014 at 11:02 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: One of my favorite FDR quotes... can't really imagine a Democrat or a Republican having the guts to say this today:
"Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions-/that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives heartily disagree."
If only that part I made bold was still true.
If you took every CEO of every company and stopped paying them completely but instead divided that money around to all the employees they manage. I bet it would result in an insignificant pay increase for Joe six pack.
What CEO's make, while often obscene, isn't a meaningful factor in this discussion. There simply aren't enough CEOs to make a difference.
This is all just speculation on my part.....but I did a little calculation for shits and giggles.....I wanted to see if my claim is even plausible. So I did a little googling. Walmart CEO makes 35 million a year. Walmart has 2.2 million employees. 35 million divided by 2.2 million employees works out to $15.91. $15.91 divided by 52 weeks in a year works out to 30 cents. 30 cents divided by...say 20 hours a week works out to 1.5 cents per hour.
So if you eliminated Walmart's CEO pay...you could increase a Walmart employees wage by 1.5 cents per hour.
(April 14, 2014 at 11:03 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Clearly, many more people would benefit if the poor were less poor and the rich were less rich.
Poor people benefit the most when the economy is conducive to maximizing the production of goods and services. How many cars or refrigerators, or TVs or TV dinners, can the exceedingly wealthy consume?
That's a major problem, that much of the money earned by the super rich goes into a savings account and never funnels back out into the economy. I don't think the solution is dissolving a CEO's salary and spreading it to all the employees, though something in that direction would be a great start. I think all profits after a certain point should primarily go back to the workers who make it possible. So perhaps considering what Walmart makes in a given year, all employees receive a portion of that in a nice bonus that they can receive lump sum or have added to their weekly paycheck the following year.
So if they take $5 billion out of the $17 billion in profits they made last year and divided that up between all their employees, that's another $2,272 for each person. A decent bonus.