It's Not Easy Being Ultra-Rich

By Barbara Ehrenreich

This Labor Day lets not forget those among us who are the most fortunate.

On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America's underpaid and overworked blue and pink collar workers -- janitors, flight attendants, forklift operators and the like.

But this year let's go a step further and salute the most reviled and despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor. You are thinking perhaps of telemarketers, human traffickers, and the fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your health insurance. But I'm talking about our CEOs.

Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups -- United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies -- have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their special exclusive CEO pension funds.

They further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.

And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/IPS folks state that: "The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That's ... 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military."

You know what we're supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have all that responsibility! They're responsible for national security, or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our national security apparatus!

But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a hard-headed, bottom-line, sort of way?

Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people currently in Iraq, about 130,000 in round numbers, and suppose you manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of a dead soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13 billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single afternoon, without anyone even noticing. Q.E.D., there is simply no comparison between a general and a CEO.

That's a side issue though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent about making, is that it's damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich.........