You're looking at the wrong pot of money. Dividing up executive wages among the lowest paid workers has never been considered a reasonable proposal for solving

You're looking at the wrong pot of money. Dividing up executive wages among the lowest paid workers has never been considered a reasonable proposal for solving inadequate wages for workers; a more reasonable proposal involves including worker compensation in the distribution of profits from the business. While the CEO might "only" make 50 million, the organization would be expected to make much more. Let's take Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) as an example because, conveniently, their CEO made ~$50M in 2013. [1] Their annual earnings report indicates that they had a net income of $1.04B that year, and their corporate profile suggests they have ~60,000 employees. [2][3] If they spent 100% of their current profits on employee salaries it would yield ~$17k/employee. (For reference, the full-time minimum wage salary in 2013 was $15,080. [4]) Even under much more reasonable conditions -- let's say that we allocate 1/4 of net income to worker salaries -- then each of their 60,000 workers would earn an additional $3800, which is just about equal to the max EITC for a family with one child in 2013. [5] It's really not about CEOs getting paid huge amounts, it's that workers are neither represented nor included in sharing the prosperity of their labor -- and taxpayers are subsidizing the difference. [1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/04/bed-bath--beyond-ceos-2013-comp-worth-50-million/9977663/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/04/bed-... [2] http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bbby/financials http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bbby/financials [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=BBBY+Profile https://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=BBBY+Profile [4] http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-anymore-raising/ http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-... [5] http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/2013-EITC-Income-Limits,-Maximum-Credit--Amounts-and-Tax-Law-Changes http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/2013-EITC-Income-Limits,-Maxi...