And the hooker I paid for last night jacked her price up to 60 bucks, meaning all hookers across the country must be multikatrillionaire hookers by now, with spinning platinum rims on their Corvettes.

No, no, no.
Here, let me fix that for you.
“And the hooker I paid for last night jacked her price up to 60 bucks, meaning all hookers across the country must be multikatrillionaire hookers by now, with spinning platinum rims on their money-makerz and their momma-udders.”
There.

Yeah, I’m a dick.

Yeah, but at least you’re not a dickwad.

And no one said that CEOs were EVIL USELESS PEOPLE! That distinction belongs to Libertarians.

I’ll crawl back into my eco-friendly hole now.

…And attempting to take it to yet another level. And then, you went even further. Alas, it would be impossible to refine all the variables to where you’d be accurate enough for a, say, book-length substantive discussion — I certainly don’t claim to be able to, and perhaps I should have qualified my comment more carefully. Unfortunately Mickey Kaus won’t even go as far as the least concerned of us would…

And I’ll stay mum on your defensiveness, seening as you were posting on a site that [homervoice]shhhh! MIGHT EVEN HOST SOME COMMUNIST POSTERS.[/homervoice].

Also, I liked your line about “data” not being the plural of “anecdote.”

When times are trying, ImJohnGalt, think of George Soros and Warren Buffett.

I chose a 60 hr work week. Even if you made it 24/7 (168 hrs) it works out to $1545/hr.

Ultimately; my point was, how dare that ignorant fuck whine about $9.50/hr as somehow ‘TOO HIGH’, when it is LEECH CEO’s who are the problem.

owlbear, of course, you’re correct. Forgive my verbal diarrhea above in solidarity with those oppressed CEO’s making a shitload of money. My intent was not to defend the massively high compensation of corrupt CEOs (or even those who have integrity but are still outrageously paid), but rather to assuage myself that not everyone who attains those positions is a complete dickwad.

I went right to the source (Forbes) for their 2005 rankings (the latest available), and the median *total* compensation of fortune 500 CEOs, which included stocks/options/etc. was $4.7 Mn. The year before it was $3.4 Mn. I humbly admit that I’m basically arguing how many angels can fit in Mickey Kaus’s cold, cold heart, so I’ll just pack up my receptacle full of Splenda-sweetened fruit dessert and stop now.

Minimum wage should be a helluva lot more than $9.50 or whatever the fuck Mickey Kaus thinks the local Big Boy should be paying its dishwashers, yes.

Mickey Kaus is a venal man whose compassion (and intellect) could fit in a fullerene and still have room left over for, uh…whatever else is that small that would make my point for me.

In the face of growing numbers of poverty, that any CEO (especially those that have failed elsewhere) can make a salary measured in the high double-digit millions seems very un-Christian to me, and I’m an atheist.

Don’t even get me started on athletes and movie star compensation.

In a moment of clarity, I realize that I was just feeling guilty in the face of these numbers that I’d like to be rich someday too, and was rather trying to convince myself that becoming a wealthy Republican prick wasn’t inevitable. I’ll refrain from working out my issues in public from now on.

If you think saying things like that is going to earn you respect, you really need to reevaluate your assumptions.

I chose a 60 hr work week. Even if you made it 24/7 (168 hrs) it works out to $1545/hr.

Ultimately; my point was, how dare that ignorant fuck whine about $9.50/hr as somehow ‘TOO HIGH’, when it is LEECH CEO’s who are the problem.

Middlingest of middle managers, perhaps, but you’d be surprised how little the upper management — specifically, the executives — work. I say let’s improve our assumptions even more.

I know, I should just let this be. I agree in more than principle that the gap between C-level execs and line workers is totally fucked up, but headline-hogging corrupt motherfuckers notwithstanding, this just hasn’t been my experience. I would indeed be surprised if you knew tons of upper management across a broad number of companies that don’t work very hard.

I’m a business owner. I employ 20 people up here in Canada. I *never* work less than 70 hour weeks. I usually crawl out of bed, work until 11:00, crawl back into bed, and repeat. I haven’t had a vacation in 3 years, provide great benefits to my employees and my take home pay is barely more than any of them.

My wife is a senior exec (general counsel) in a fairly large ($1 Bn revenue per year) movie exhibition company. She gets paid about twice as much as GM line workers (many of whom at our local plant made more than $100k last year with overtime – I don’t begrudge them this, btw). I barely see her because she works at *least* as many hours as I do and (like I do) feels like she falls further and further behind at work because they don’t have budget to give her the additional lawyers she needs.

Before moving back to Canada I worked in NYC as a business strategy consultant, which basically meant I did a whole lot of work for CEO’s of multinationals, usually financial analyses around growth strategies we were recommending. We’re not talking Dennis Koszloskis or Ken Lays who were basically fisting their shareholders and employees, but people in non-sexy industries who were really fucking stressed-out trying to create returns for their shareholders while trying to do right by the people who worked for them and their customers.

Not all senior executives ride in private jets and buy $6000 umbrella-stands. I know it may not mean much, and that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote”, but I knew a whole lot of executives that flew coach, drove Toyotas and bought clothes off the rack at Macy’s. It being NYC, many of them even voted Democratic (surprise!)

I dunno why I feel compelled to write this. I’m not defending the 450x-salary CEO, but “senior executive” doesn’t automatically mean “fucking over the rest of the workers”. The demands on a CEO are great. You don’t often read about the ones with integrity who do their job because it ain’t newsworthy, but they’re out there. You might not believe that networking in Aspen (or Davos) might be considered part of the job description, but guess what? Some people get paid to neck with Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd on camera (not at the same time – that happens in my dreams every night).

FWIW, I’m a huge-fucking-l Liberal who happily pays my taxes (both corporate and personal) because I appreciate everything that I’m fortunate enough to have. I volunteer, I would vote for a bowl of Lime Jello if it were the Democratic candidate (I’m a dual US/Canadian citizen), but there’s nothing inherently evil about being a senior executive. There are good and bad Senators and Congressmen. There are good and bad sports teams (fuck you, Yankees!), and there are good and bad executives. I just don’t see the upside of demonizing them just because they got to the positions they did.

Now, if you want to pillory those who fail upward (WPE, anyone?) or who do live lives of excess while doing nothing to make the world a better place, well, praise the lord and pass the tomatoes.

Middlingest of middle managers, perhaps, but you’d be surprised how little the upper management — specifically, the executives — work. I say let’s improve our assumptions even more.

(And yes, I’d have to see some very compelling reasons why schmoozing over cocktails, COO “boot camps” in Puerto Vallarta or Ibiza, and networking in Aspen should be considered work. Just because it’s done on the company dime doesn’t count.)