Monday, June 27, 2011

Wealth, Poverty, and The Other Guys

by Hans Hibbard


When we discussed in class about wealth and poverty I immediately thought about the end credits of this movie. "The Other Guys" is a buddy-cop-comedy, starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. They play two New York cops who stop a Ponzi scheme. The movie is hilarious and I encourage everyone to see it if you're looking for a good laugh, but it gets very serious at the end of the movie when the credits start to roll. The credits show how greedy people are that run corporations. Click play below to see what I'm talking about:


319:1 is the ratio of CEO salary to average employee salary. Just multiply your salary in 2010 by three hundred nineteen and that's how much more these greedy people are making than you. Can you believe these people make millions of dollars per year for dealing with the same work related stress levels as the rest of us. Our government bailed out these companies in 2008 even after they failed to keep their companies financially stable, and on top of that, the executives all gave themselves bonuses. Who gets a bonus for failing at their job?! I made a critical error last week at work and I was almost terminated. I wasn't given a beach house in Miami!

Just like the NFL, NHL, and MLB have salary caps for the players, corporations need to have salary caps as well. Even if you cap an executive's salary at $2,000,000 per year, that is still plenty of money for any American family of four to live, prosper, and have some money left over for retirement. It would help so many middle class and working class people have better lives if they invested the difference in salary to the people on the bottom of the ladder. Middle class and working class jobs are the back bone of these corporations anyway. We shouldn't have to work ten times as hard as the people on top only to receive low monetary recognition, and poor benefits. America can fix the poverty issue if just one corporation would cap the salaries, and invest more money into their line-level employees.

1 comment:

  1. I agree with what the author is saying but I dont ever see it happening. We live in a country where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and it is just the way it is. I dont know what can be done cause very few people do the the most benifitial things when they receive an increase in money they just adabt to their income. Yes I think there should be a salary cap but I also think us as americans should do a lot better with our money when oppertunities come.

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