Fair Pay: Hillary’s At It Again! (Guest Post)

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fair pay

One of the cornerstones of Hillary’s presidential campaign is the concept of “fair pay.” HER definition of fair pay.

Hillary said on April 14 that “The average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes.”

Really?

It’s important to understand how Hillary got that figure. She was relying on a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank. An EPI study of 2013 pay found that for the top 350 U.S. firms (in terms of sales), the average CEO pay was $15.2 million, a ratio of 295.9 times higher than the average pay of workers at those companies.

To get that ratio, EPI bought CEO salary figures from Compustat, a division of Standard & Poor’s. The salaries included salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, options exercised and long-term incentive payouts.

EPI then examined Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for the hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory “typical” workers in the industries of the 350 companies it studied. EPI determined that, including health care benefits, the median earnings was $55,800.

Then EPI divided the pay of the specific company’s CEO by the annual earning for the typical worker in that company’s industry. The 295.9 ratio is the average of the 350 ratios calculated.

However, here’s where Hillary’s argument begins to break down.

Most CEOs don’t work at large companies like the ones EPI studied. The BLS says there are more than 246,000 CEOs in the US, with a median annual wage of $173,320. The median pay for ALL workers was, according to the BLS, was, in 2014, $41,132. So the CEOs earned 4.21 times what workers earned.   ($173320/$41132)

From The Wall Street Journal comes another pay picture, a very different CEO pay picture than the one Hillary paints:

For 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there were 255,940 non-self-employed CEOs in the U.S. For the same year, the BLS likewise estimated that the mean annual salary of these CEOs was $176,840. When compared with the July 2012 seasonally adjusted average annual pay of $34,645 for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls in the U. S., as also estimated by the BLS, the ratio of the average CEO pay to the pay of an average employee as calculated by the AFL-CIO shrinks from 354 to 1 to just over 5 to 1.

But the most striking action is this. Hillary recently demanded and got $300,000 from UCLA for speaking for 30 minutes. That’s an annual salary of $1,248,000,000, or 22,365.6 times the annual earning of EPI’s “typical” employee. Or, as Victor Davis Hanson put it:

At UCLA recently, Clinton’s fee worked out to about $165 per second. In three minutes of autobiographical chitchat, Clinton pulled in more than the average full-time fast-food worker makes in a year.

And let’s not forget that while senator she paid women staffers only 72% of what she paid men staffers.

Fair Pay?!? Yeah, right. Only in HillaryWorld.


Cross-posted at Well Said, my personal very conservative web site

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So, Hillary took a study of cherry-picked highest-end data then claimed it was AVERAGE?
How stupid was that?
Perhaps she was just trying to make her own numbers not look so high-end.

It seems she is also being caught talking to herself as a way to avoid taking media questions.
Weird since she’s only taken 7 questions from the media since announcing her run.
And she didn’t really answer many of those 7 questions, just dodged.

the average life expediency of a CEO is about 30 months depending upon the composition of the company. McDonald’s is a prime example of leadership lack. The cash cow of McDonald’s expired a few years ago. Taking quarterly reviews on regional offices and even inter city has demonstrated a subtle decrease in revenues for the last three years. .021% decrease/ monthly in not huge but adding it up over three years and the numbers become big in an accumulative manner quickly.

@mos 8541:
Your remark about the short shelf life of an American CEO reminded me of Maggie Thatcher’s 98% tax on rock stars in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
All the Beatles, T-Rex’s Marc Bolan, many of the Rolling Stones, Donovan and many other top rock and pop and even folk stars had to quit the UK to survive.
They were sure their rock status would not last because most of their peers died a sales’ death within 4 years.
It was a quirk that a few of them survived to become popular again later.
But, like a football pro or boxer too high a tax meant having to protect your future by moving away to where you could save for it.

Even France had to back off its recent millionaire’s tax.
The country lost too many of its wealthiest consumers.

Nanny,

I recollect a not-so-long-ago Stone’s world tour where the group played major venues except in the UK because appearing there would have meant they had ALL their revenue from ALL the concerts taxed at the UK rate. Fans were irate at…the Stones, not the stupid law.

ever wonder why all the major corporations -Medtronic are leaving the U.S.? the fool wants to create a welfare state for his people on the backs of working America.

Why are you so mean? She’s a girl!
Don’t criticize her! You are sexist!
She stood by her man, after all. That qualifies her for anything.
The comments above summarize political speech in our low information age.
Fact: St Hillary has zero executive experience.
Fact: it is illegal to ask what she did at State. Those records are stored with Barak’s college info, the Lerner emails, and all other state secrets.

Well, if Hillary didn’t lie, she’d have nothing to say. Recently, she’s been pandering to the black community by promising to release all those incarcerated for non-violent crimes, such as drug dealing. Only problem is, Bill Clinton instituted THAT policy.

http://politicalconundrum.lefora.com/topic/19422499/steps-Hillary-Clinton-calls-overhaul-crime-policies?page=2