Dayuhan, did you really buy into all that propaganda that the rich and super-rich "deserve" their huge income?
That's wrong in so many ways...there's a huge spread between average worker income and CEO income that hasn't been nearly as great just a few decades before. CEOs did certainly not multiply their productivity like that.
Is there any reason to believe that some executives multiplied their productivity that much while others didn't?
In the case of higher executive pay, they ripped the workers off much of their pensions. That's (in part) how they did it, and the country was so much lacking checks and balances due to gutted-down labour unions that they got away with it.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/books/...ook/50795990/1Immelt and other corporate spokespeople have suggested that pension plan shortfalls are caused by out-of-control factors such as the large number of retirees, declining stock market investment returns and competition from foreign competitors that eschew good benefits for laborers.
Schultz knows better from her extensive research. She is a reporter who has become an expert in a relatively narrow subject matter. As she writes, "What Immelt didn't mention was that, far from being a burden, GE's pension and retiree plans had contributed billions of dollars to the company's bottom line over the past decade and a half, and were responsible for a chunk of the earnings that the executives had taken credit for. Nor were these retirement programs — even with GE's 230,000 retirees — bleeding the company of cash. In fact, GE hadn't contributed a cent to the workers' pension plans since 1987 but still had enough money to cover all the current and future retirees."
Then Schultz delivers the clincher: GE was indeed burdened by a pension plan — the plan for top executives. The obligations of that plan, for a minuscule number of individuals compared with the 230,000 lower-level retirees, totaled $4.4 billion and had drained about $573 million from the corporate treasury over the past three years.
And that's an example from some super-rich who work(ed). Many super-rich aren't productive at all.
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