This week, an in-depth study conducted by the staff of Congressman Keith Ellison was released that showed that the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio has now reached 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1.
The study, titled Rewarding Or Hoarding?: An Examination of Pay Ratios Revealed by Dodd-Frank, shed light on America’s growing income inequality and how U.S. corporations are so easily able to corrupt our Democracy.
“Now we know why CEOs didn’t want this data released,” says Ellison, who championed the implementation of the pay ratio disclosure rule as it was written into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010. “I knew inequality was a great problem in our society but I didn’t understand quite how extreme it was.”
“If wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, then obviously wealth is being dissipated from more and more people,” Ellison continued. “We have people who are paying more half their income in rent, and we have whole school districts where poverty is erasing any opportunity for Americans to climb that ladder.”
For more on the study conducted by the office of Congressman Ellison, CLICK HERE for coverage in The Guardian or HERE for a direct link to the study itself.