Top 100 CEO Retirement Savings Equals 41% of U.S. Families
Source: Bloomberg Business
by Jesse Drucker Carol Hymowitz Caleb Melby
http://twitter.com/JesseDrucker
http://twitter.com/CalebMelby
October 28, 2015 12:01 AM EDT
CEOs' $4.9 billion in excess of 116 million people's accounts
Former Yum CEO Novak tops list with $234.2 million in savings
The retirement savings accumulated by just 100 chief executives are equal to the entire retirement accounts of 41 percent of U.S. families -- or more than 116 million people, a new study finds.
In a report scheduled for release today, the Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies found that the 100 largest chief executive retirement funds are worth an average of about $49.3 million per executive, or a combined $4.9 billion. David C. Novak, the recently departed chief executive officer of Yum! Brands Inc., is at the top of the list, with total retirement savings of $234.2 million.
In recent years, pay and income inequality across different income groups have received increasing attention in the U.S. Significantly less attention has been focused on the growing gulf in retirement savings, a lack of focus that the studys authors say they are attempting to address.
This CEO-to-worker retirement gap is a lot bigger than the pay gap and one more indicator of the extreme level of inequality that is really tearing the country apart, said Sarah Anderson, the reports co-author and the global economy project director at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-28/top-100-ceo-retirement-savings-equals-41-of-u-s-families
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)because the politicians have let business steal from labor for the past decades, including this one, so they can then tell us there isn't enough social security.
I am tired of lying, thieving,backstabbing politicians.
It's time for a bigger change than we even have on the table.
Glorfindel
(9,733 posts)"France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.
"It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.
" But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous."
It is way, way past time for a bigger change than we even have on the table.
olegramps
(8,200 posts)The modus operandi for this to take place is very simple. Unionize. The road map for this was clearly laid out by FDR. Impose 90% income taxes on the wealthy and confiscate the money they stole by cutting the amount that can be inherited to a minimum. Pass laws and fine corporations for banking billions in phony overseas banks. Impose SS taxes on all income with no cutoff. It is a damn rip off that millionaires only pay a infinitesimal fraction of what that steal into SS while the working class contribute a significant portion of their pay for the same benefits. If you really wants to stop illegal immigration start with those who over stay their visas and impose stiff fines on anyone who knowingly hires illegal immigrants. The Republicans in typical hypocritical fashion, scream about illegal immigration but are not about to punish the wealthy for exploiting them.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)fyi - If I had a religion, it would be the IWW.
We need an industrial union. 1. It will control the work and assets. The members can buy or own or ?, but they control the work.
Too many people forget that the reason we got the milk toast changes of FDR (those that business LET him have) was because of the struggle of those prior to FDR.
That is partly by design. Most people's schooling starts with FDR because they don't want to teach you that there were Americans who thought they should control their own work, and that the government helped kill them off.
Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, James J. Matles, and many others envisioned a time when workers would control their work. They rejected socialism and communism (these things are recorded in their words, in their biographies at your local university library - with letters of complaint from the communist organizers back to Russia - lol), and they didn't want the horrors that unrestrained capitalism benefitting the few (as we have today) had visited upon us. They came to the realization that ownership would have to be part of it. They talk about not having come up with the answer before the government killed them off. Maybe it would have meant cooperatives, like that developed in Spain in the 50s (Mondragon).
Around 1913 the Walsh Commission met to study work conditions. Testimony was given by Haywood, Mother Jones, and others (good stuff). One of the things that came out of it was a back-of-the-napkin calculation of the amount of money business was spending on spies, assassins, politicians, and police, dirty tricks, etc.
`$80 million a year was his calculation. That was in 1913. Try that in an inflation calculator, and reflect on whether you think business is spending less or more to get their way today.
They used it to conspire with the government and the AF of L, the "business union" (Mother Jones might have spit on the ground with that one, after they got her 60 year old body thrown in jail), and to jail or kill off unions and union members using a variety of excuses, with their opposition to WWI being the last major one.
The IWW was fighting for freedom. When they quit, we lost. They quit fighting because business, the government, and the business union conspired to defeat them.
But mostly they lost because that conspiracy had convinced a majority of the American people that a little comfort at work was better than fighting for freedom.
Until that comes back, this is all just Dancing with the Stars.
olegramps
(8,200 posts)But also give Roosevelt credit for his accomplishments. The 40-hour work week, abolishment of child labor, mandatory education of children, Social Security, FDA...need I go on?
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)aside, it's still a road map for failure. Nothing in that says we would go a different direction from exactly where we are toda
If it had not been for the people who died to get there, most all of which is no longer in our lying textbooks (can't have the people getting uppity and thinking they should have freedom, eh?), virtually none of the so-called reforms would never have happened, reforms that are only seen as that on this side of history. The same things would have been called defeat prior to people wanting to be patted on the back for such a weak effort - efforts which mostly kept business profitable, without giving up control.
Like any good plantation.
The progressive era ended before that. The use of the word after that is mostly subterfuge, and marketing.
One should read the words of Mother Jones and others who tell how the two-faced AF of L, being a business union, worked in league with the government and business unions to kill off the IWW and the industrial unions, those who allowed women and black folks in their ranks, and leave us with the system wherein people can pretend they aren't slaves, with two-faced unions pretending they are there for the workers, while doing the bidding of the business.
It was, and is, a system which throws scraps to people and pretends they taste like freedom. Like a modern plantation, we stand as evidence that you don't need chains, you just need to control their minds.
It's just too profitable for politicians and others to be cowards, as Jay Gould pointed out.
If we do the same things again, we will wind up exactly where we are now. It would be slightly deranged not to think so.
SharonAnn
(13,778 posts)So they will have very generous incomes after their "retirement" and will probably never need to touch their savings. They can just pass it down, tax-free, to their heirs.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)How long can this trend continue? What's the breaking point?
K&R
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Rond Vidar
(64 posts)Scuba
(53,475 posts)Rond Vidar
(64 posts)Scuba
(53,475 posts)Rond Vidar
(64 posts)Would you have the federal government take (just to pick a number) 1% of the assets owned by anyone over a certain wealth threshold each year?
Scuba
(53,475 posts)... hiding profits overseas. Then yeah, seems like any wealth over, say, $100 million could be taxed at, say, 50%. Doing this just once would raise a helluva lot of revenue.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)could evaporate overnight if too much is taxed, not to mention impact future growth. But the basic idea is sound, IMO.
mpcamb
(2,875 posts)Tax 'em and double it if they've given up their American citizenship.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/elite-wealth-management/410842/
Add Dublin, Mauritania, Belize to the list.
olegramps
(8,200 posts)JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Mass seizure of all property over $10 million individual wealth by market prices one year prior to the seizure.
Show trials for all bankers, billionaires, corporate chiefs, hedge fund managers, ratings agency executives.
Special one-time reintroduction of the guillotine for beheading the lucky 10,000.
There, you happy?
Rond Vidar
(64 posts)JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)A wealth tax is not hard to understand, but I thought I'd give you what you probably wanted to hear.
Rond Vidar
(64 posts)And you thought that your, er....interesting proposal was that....why?
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Also, there's no limit to fantasy.
closeupready
(29,503 posts)Or maybe they don't seem to be because we've been at this for a while longer...?
Rond Vidar
(64 posts)Also, there's no limit to fantasy.
Fantasizing about cutting off the heads of thousands of people doesn't turn my crank, but if that's your thing...
Well, to each their own, I say.
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Let's fantasize instead that the rich created their own wealth, and that we live at their expense.
I don't want to cut off anyone's head. I'm just serving up the fantasy image you seem to want in advocates of a wealth tax.
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)We won't have to keep the guillotine busy too long.
Enrique
(27,461 posts)Gloria
(17,663 posts)And that isn't even counting those who have nothing or very little...the 41% are the ones lucky enough to have some sort of retirement account...
The upcoming generations will be in a "retirement depression."
Release The Hounds
(467 posts)HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)* - Only applies to concerned citizens taking wealthy people to task for their extreme wealth and underpayment of taxes via legislation and insider lobbying. NEVER applies to Republicans yapping on and on about "welfare queens" and the supposed high-on-the-hog benefits the poor allegedly get.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)Our society is disgusting.