- Buffy Weill-Greenberg
So before The Apprentice went all Brangelina and invited celebrities to compete to raise funds for corporations which would in turn raise money for charity (celebrity/corporate philanthropy is a topic for another column), Donald Trump told his contestants that he would divide them into the haves and have-nots. (For a refresher on that season, read this.)
Here is our country at a glance, according to Too Much:
Try visualizing wealth in the United States as a three-piece pie, with one piece going to the top 1 percent, one to the next richest 9 percent, and one to everyone else. In 2004, America’s top 1 percent held over $2.5 trillion more in net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent, according to Federal Reserve data supplemented by the annual Forbes 400 list.
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In 2004, the nation’s top 1 percent raked in more income than the bottom 40 percent, Congressional Budget Office research released in December 2006 indicates.
Every year Forbes rates the top earners in entertainment. People who receive obscene amounts of money for modeling, acting, singing or just being famous for being bootylicious (my big butted sister Kim K.) I don’t care what they can do — no one deserves to earn that much money.
So in a semi-regular column I’ll go through that list and break down what their income could pay for in our country, if that person limited themselves to a $4 million/year salary. (And yes, I’ll include what the celeb pays out in charity — I’ll be fair.) In a May 2007 story Too Much published a story on an income cap:
Can our contemporary world be saved — from the problems that ail us, from climate change and oil dependency, from AIDS and religious extremism, from poverty and inequality? Foreign Policy, the world’s most prestigious global affairs journal, is tackling this weighty question head on, in a new issue that asks 21 of our earth’s most thoughtful observers to suggest the “one solution that would make the world a better place.”
That “one solution,” suggests Howard Gardner, the Harvard-based psychologist whose widely acclaimed books on human intelligence have been translated into 26 languages, ought to be a cap on the income and wealth that any one individual can accumulate.
The United States needs an income cap, Gardner posits in the new Foreign Policy, that limits the amount of money a single individual can annually take home to no more than “100 times as much money as the average worker in a society earns in a year.”
“If the average worker makes $40,000,” Gardner proposes, “the top compensated individual may keep $4 million a year.”
