Conservatives love to bring up movie stars, ballplayers, etc, who earn what the traffic will bear. If owneers/producers don’t want to pay them, they don’t have to. They are, essentially, highly paid employees who generate enormous sums of revenue. In the case of CEOs, they arroagte vast sums of corporate profits to themselves at the expense of employees. In 1977 the ratio of average CEO pay to that of the average employee was 36-1 — fairly reasonable. Now it’s 364-1 and the gap between the rich and poor is the widest it’s been since the 20s. The average employee earns just under $30,000 per year while the average CEO earns by his decree an average of $11 million/annum. I’m a professional writer who has watched with mounting melancholy as the rich plunder this country for their own personal gain while leaving working families holding down 2-3 jobs just to try to keep their heads at water level. Quite frankly, Ms. Miester, smug, pity-the-gnomes-of-Zurich snits such as you make me despair for this country — and, more frankly, to vomit.
