Oh yeah, and rising income inequality. The gains that you see in the stock market over the last 30 years aren't translating to higher wages and better conditions overall for workers across the board. They are more and more going to the top of the ladder.
Top CEOs Make 300 Times More than Typical WorkersPay Growth Surpasses Stock Gains and Wage Growth of Top 0.1 Percent
http://www.epi.org/publication/top-c...e-0-1-percent/
Quote:
The chief executive officers of America’s largest firms earn three times more than they did 20 years ago and at least 10 times more than 30 years ago, big gains even relative to other very-high-wage earners. These extraordinary pay increases have had spillover effects in pulling up the pay of other executives and managers, who constitute a larger group of workers than is commonly recognized.1 Consequently, the growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares of the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007 (Bivens and Mishel 2013; Bakija, Cole, and Heim 2012). Since then, income growth has remained unbalanced: as profits have reached record highs and the stock market has boomed, the wages of most workers, stagnant over the last dozen years, including during the prior recovery, have declined during this one (Bivens et al. 2014; Gould 2015) .
In examining trends in CEO compensation to determine how well the top 1 and 0.1 percent are faring through 2014, this paper finds:
Average CEO compensation for the largest firms was $16.3 million in 2014. This estimate uses a comprehensive measure of CEO pay that covers chief executives of the top 350 U.S. firms and includes the value of stock options exercised in a given year. Compensation is up 3.9 percent since 2013 and 54.3 percent since the recovery began in 2009.
From 1978 to 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO compensation increased 997 percent, a rise almost double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.9 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.
The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, 20-to-1 in 1965, peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000 and was 303-to-1 in 2014, far higher than in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
Some people will say "well that's just meritocracy" but the truth is it's really choking up our economy. The middle class is falling apart and the working class is living on debt, and that means people don't have money to spend at local businesses even though the unemployment rate is 4.9%, which is a VERY good unemployment rate. And is it really a meritocracy when most of these CEOs went to the same Ivy League schools that the vast majority of people, more and more, could never afford to go to?