Monday, March 14, 2011

Bill Maher’s Real Time – Interesting, Amusing, Depressing …

I really enjoy his show. New Rules is always an absolute hoot. And I love it when he tees off on fundamental injustices.

In the recent episode #205, he dwells a bit on the staggering income differential between CEOs and the average wage earner. He mentions an example where you have 100 people who order a pizza with 100 slices and when it arrives, the top 1 person takes 80 of them.

Audience laughs, but realizes that he’s not really kidding. So I went looking for his source, and found an article that must be where he got a lot of his stats.

That article links to numerous others. It shows that CEOs were making something like 40x the average worker’s pay in the 70s and even as late as 1980. But apparently it was greed’s time to shine from that point on and we have now landed in a position where, as of 2007, the CEOs on the DOW-JONES are making a stunning 550x the average salary!

This graphic is representative of the wealth of information (pun intended) contained in this article … and the level of painful realization as to how screwed we are as a global economy …

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