California Starts Fleecing the Rich

Even 15 percent is way too fucking low - and far below what companies managed to pay without going out of business in the '50s and '60s (when CEOs made about 20 times the average wage) - but it's a start.

Alan Pyke at Think Progress:

If California companies want to keep paying their CEO’s a hundred times better than their workers, they could face higher tax rates. A bill to impose higher tax rates on companies with excessively high CEO-to-worker pay ratios passed its first legislative hurdle on Thursday, advancing out of a state Senate committee on a 5-2 vote.

If SB1372 were to become law, which its authors told the Associated Press is unlikely, the state’s current flat-rate corporate income tax would be replaced by a sliding scale. Most companies would pay an income tax rate ranging from 7 percent to 13 percent depending on the ratio between their top executive’s earnings and what their median employee earned in the same year. Financial companies would face a scale from 9 percent to 15 percent.

The high end of those scales would only affect firms that pay their top executives 400 times better than their median employee. The current fixed rates of 10.84 percent for financial firms and 8.84 percent for others would disappear, meaning companies with CEO-to-worker pay ratios below 100 would see a tax cut from the measure.