I'm surprised the Guardian doesn't seem to raise this but the ever-increasing CEO pay packet I think is of less importance than this: real wages have essentiall

I'm surprised the Guardian doesn't seem to raise this but the ever-increasing CEO pay packet I think is of less importance than this: real wages have essentially been flat for 40 years [1]. At the same time we have: 1. Corporations are paying less tax, largely due to tax avoidance schemes that mostly revolve around transfer pricing, particularly of so-called "IP"; 2. Wealthy individuals pay less taxes. And here the tax rate they pay is a bit of a red herring. You see for most people they pay tax on their entire income. For the wealthiest individuals, they only pay taxes on what they (choose to) realize, which is significantly less than income. The counterargument is that this is simply deferring tax liabilities but if you can defer something essentially forever, it's basically the same thing as not paying it; 3. Zero interest rates mean that both wealthy individuals and companies can borrow money at little to no cost instead of realizing income or profits to gain disposable capital. You need $50m? Well, you can realize $100m and pay taxes on that or you can simply borrow $50m at 0.5% interest rate and not pay any taxes. Here's an accounting change we need: borrowing money is treated as distributing a profit (for a company) or realizing income (for an individual). So, back to CEO pay. Here's the problem: a lot of very mediocre CEOs earn astronomical pay packets because of justifications about "market rates", "large companies" and the like. Their impact is overstated due to outliers like Steve Jobs. Here's a comparison. Steve Jobs earned roughly $2.1 billion from his comeback to Apple CEO [2]. Considering the transformation and the value returned to Apple shareholders, paying him 10x that would've been a bargain. Compare that to... Sundar Pichai, who seems to earn ~$250m/year as Alphabet CEO... for what exactly? I mean what has Google done since 2015 (when Pichai become CEO) other than extract more from the ad golden goose? Here's the problem: boards set CEO compensation. Who sits on boards? Other CEOs of course. How is that compensation determined? In part by what other CEOs earn. It's almost like the top 0.001% have been put in charge of setting their own compensation. [1]: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R45090.pdf [2]: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/what-was-steve-jobs-net-worth.html/ https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/what-was-steve-jobs...