Income Disparity

Today a person explained to me how the wealth disparity in the United States is the greatest in recorded history. Even worse than at the height of the Roman Empire or just before the French Revolution when people rose up and put the heads of the wealthy on pikes.

Ponder, if you will, a radically simple solution. Let's do away with minimum wage laws and replace them with maximum wage laws. Nobody can make more than 10x what the lowest paid individual makes.

Simple, isn't it? Current National minimum wage is at $7.25/hour. Instead let's say that nobody can earn more than $72.50/hour. Assuming a 40 hour work week, that means a CEO couldn't earn more than an estimated $150k ($150,000) per year. Horrifying! At least it would be horrifying to the average CEO that currently makes $11.4M ($11,400,000) a year. But if our current minimum wage assumes that a full time worker can actually live on $15,000 a year, I feel certain the CEOs could figure out a way to survive. After all, they are so smart that they deserve to get paid huge sums.

But some people just love to make loads and loads of money. We can't just take that away from them. No problem! Two simple solutions. (I do love simple solutions.)

First, they can work tirelessly to raise the bottom income. If the lowliest worker saw a moderate increase to just $10/hour, a CEO could then earn over $200,000 a year! Raise it to $20/hour and the top dogs could bring home $400,000. And you can bet the minimum would go up fast if it directly affected the maximum.

The second option for people who just can't make enough money is to let them earn as much as they want. That's right, you can't actually cap their genius money making capabilities. They were born to horde cash! So every dollar earned over the 'maximum' gets taxed at a 75% rate. They still get to make more than everyone else and it helps to fund the government services we have all come to expect. Is that so much to ask? I bet everyone making less than $150,000 a year (roughly 95% of Americans) would find this acceptable.

Or we could just put rich people's heads on pikes.