The Hillary Pay Ratio
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hillary-pay-ratio-1429054250?mod=hp_opinion
A new index to chart the gap between political words and deeds.
Just in time for Wednesday’s nationwide walk-out by fast-food workers to demand a higher minimum wage, Hillary Clinton emailed supporters this week to complain about pay differentials in American business. According to Reuters, Mrs. Clinton griped that “the average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes.”
Many of these CEOs can only wish they were rewarded for their time as handsomely as Mrs. Clinton is. The expected 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has been paid as much as $300,000 per speech.
Supporters of Wednesday’s worker rallies are hoping that Mrs. Clinton will endorse their demand for a $15 minimum wage. That’s more than double the current federal minimum of $7.25. And for the sake of argument let’s assume that $15 per hour is what event staff were paid at the venues where Mrs. Clinton spoke. We’ll also assume about 90 minutes of her time for a speech plus a question-and-answer period. Mrs. Clinton’s fee in this scenario would be more than 13,000 times the earnings of the typical worker.
Not many CEOs can come close to scoring that high on the Hillary Ratio—the difference between the highest-paid worker and the typical worker in a given situation (or you could think of this as the gap between Clinton rhetoric and Clinton reality).
Mrs. Clinton said in her Sunday campaign video that the “deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” and she would know based on her taste for amenities and expenses along with her speaking fees. “She insists on staying in the ‘presidential suite’ of luxury hotels that she chooses anywhere in the world, including Las Vegas,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote last August. “She usually requires those who pay her six-figure fees for speeches to also provide a private jet for transportation—only a $39 million, 16-passenger Gulfstream G450 or larger will do.”
There’s one more way she and husband Bill have stacked the deck in their favor. The average worker—if she could even dream of pulling down $200,000 for an hour of work—would pay taxes on this income; Mrs. Clinton often doesn’t.
By routing speaking fees through their family’s foundation, the Clintons ensure that the money won’t be taxed before it is directed to support foundation travel, meals and promotional events, among other things. The highly compensated political influence peddlers at the top of the untaxed sector of the U.S. economy have found their champio
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