You shouldn't fixate on your co-workers,
Not fixate, but knowing it can be helpful for your own bargaining purposes. Why do you think employers don't like employees talking about their own pay? Meanwhile, comparing your own to somebody in a much different position than yours is...mostly useless. It can be useful if you're thinking about a career shift, or alternatively, just plain looking for something to piss and moan about.
but you should absolutely fixate on the income disparity between the top and the bottom.
Why?
The world is full of CEOs making high double digit millions who announce staff cuts to save on salary costs. The world is full of filthy rich hoarding wealth in a way that never trickles down.
And?
You should be fixated on this, it's a societal problem that has very real effects on you
No, it really doesn't. I've looked at the data people from your camp use to argue this point, which ranges from cherry-picked, downright irrelevant, or outright inconclusive, yet somehow you've managed to convince yourself that it points in your favor when it really doesn't point anywhere.
even if it's just you getting mugged by a homeless person who may otherwise not be put in a desperate position
This is a hypothetical that you guys just tell yourselves, and it has no basis in reality. A very slim minority use any of that to pay any bills, buy food, etc, and when they do, they almost always consider that to just be a side benefit, and they're not homeless or desperate, just poor, which as in the case of Pootler, is because of poor judgment more than anything else. Somebody laid off from facebook, shit, even walmart, isn't going to do this because the risk/reward just isn't even remotely worth it to them, even if they had no moral qualms about doing it. If they do, very high chance they're really going to be permanently unemployed, and they know it.
The most common motivations are first and foremost street culture, i.e. just wanting to get "bling" to show off to their peers, and very much removed from anything resembling "desperate", often even wearing nice clothes and/or driving tricked out cars while they're in the process of doing it. Right after them, it's typically a crime of opportunity, homeless or not: They see what looks like an easy target, and go for it. If somebody is both homeless and desperate, 99.99999% of the time it's because they're desperate to get their next drug fix before the withdrawal symptoms really start kicking in.
Source:
https://nij.ojp.gov/library/pu...
If homeless people are going to steal when there's no drug addiction involved. Usually it's shoplifting, and usually for something other than food because they've already got plenty of ways of getting that in abundance, often going as far as to sell their food stamps for something stupid like cigarette money.
just so some rich arsehole can claim to be a rung higher on the forbs richest list.
Again, this is just something you guys tell yourselves, it holds practically no basis in reality. In order to even get there at all, it's not done with "double-digit millions" on their W2 that you think it is. The only realistic way it's done is with capital appreciation, which itself is done by investing in some form or another. Put it this way: If I own a million shares in say Pepsi, and over 10 years increases by $1,000 per share, what does that do to my net worth? And exactly how much did it cost you? Easy: Exactly zero. This is what positive sum means -- value, or what you incorrectly refer to as wealth, literally appeared out of thin air. Zero-sum would mean that value literally had to come from somebody or somewhere else. It simply didn't.
As for the ones with the 7-digit W2s (which is incredibly rare, by the way, more often than not they're given stock options, which you can't directly measure as income until long after they're exercised and then sold) You likely tell yourself, often, that more money for them means less money for you, and that's just not the case. Like I told Pootler over there, it's not zero-sum.
You, just as they, are paid whatever the market rate is. Executives can only set their own pay if they own all the seats on the company board, which is almost never the case, and even if they were, that's just begging for a lawsuit. When even a mid-cap company board wants to hire a CEO, they don't just post a listing on linkedin. Rather, it starts with a very, very short list of names of people who they believe will be the best for the job and who they believe they can afford, and assuming it's not somebody already within the company, they go poaching.
And if the executive is good enough, they'll refuse to move at all unless the board offers them some kind of guaranteed severance should things go south, for any reason at all, because they're likely already very secure in their current job and, like most people, wouldn't want to risk giving up something that they can't go back to if they leave. That's where the so-called "golden parachute" comes from. If you're good at what you do, you can ask for that and a lot more. Why do you think A-list actors are paid in the tens of millions for a two-hour movie where the D-list gets maybe $100? Why do you think the WNBA is paid peanuts compared to the NBA?
Let's use your $50,000 programmer example -- if that "programmer" had any sense whatsoever, he'd quickly start applying to other jobs that pay more. As soon as he says "I've got another job, I'm out" if the employer values him that well, and it was within their budget, they'd try to match or beat it. What's going on in your and Pootler's head is they're just going to (or "should be required to") point-blank pay him more just because the company had a good quarter and a cash surplus. You know who does that with their budget? Politicians, and that's exactly how you get chronic budget deficits. The private sector can't do that though. Pootler over there likes to talk up the virtues about employee owned companies, especially employee-owned co-ops, and they don't even do this. Why? Because if they do, then they're always one quarter away from insolvency. Any non-government employer that wants to actually survive, regardless of ownership structure, simply can't do this. It just doesn't work. At best, it can be like the nonprofit I used to work for, who would distribute a bonus to all employees if overall revenue was good. But the bonus is pretty small (our best year when I was there was 2018, and it was a whopping $400 for the entire year.)
Back to your programmer: If he was kind of shit at his job, didn't work well with others, etc, they'd be like "have a nice trip" and never want to see him again. Your pay is what it is just to retain you as an employee. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. Taking it away from the top earners doesn't change that. Moreover, they'd have some explaining to do to the board and/or the investors for why they're paying an employee more than they need to in order to retain that employee. The US actually tried pay caps once, by the way, under FDR under an executive order (which is blatantly unconstitutional, by the way, that power belongs to the legislature, not the executive, but the legislature forced its repeal anyway.) And you know what? It didn't increase anybody else's pay. Get this though -- the bottom was getting more money, but not because of pay like you're thinking, rather because they were increasingly saving money, which in itself was primarily due to rationing. In other words, they were saving money because there was less "nice to have" stuff they could buy with their disposable incomes because the materials needed to produce those goods were going towards the war.
It's like I told you and Pootler already: The expenses really only come from consumption. It's really a fundamental law of nature. You know what they could, and *did*, spend a lot on because it wasn't rationed? Entertainment. Hollywood and movie theaters were booming in those days. Prostitutes in Oahu were literally hitting the national salary cap simply because people just didn't have anything else to spend their money on.
These are all little things that, if you pay attention to history, especially how economics historically have played out, then you'd have the benefit of hindsight before you run your mouth and say things that not only can't be proven, but in fact history directly contradicts. This is also why people laugh at you guys when you talk about the virtues of socialism, which you guys only think is a good idea because you're in your own little echo chamber which quickly dismisses anything that contradicts you before you bother to spend even a second thinking through it.
You're welcome.
