Earlier this morning I wrote:

What the Koch brothers really want, what most people in the same league as the Koch brothers always want, are more game tokens. That is what life is to the sociopaths, a vast, nearly exclusive game designed to give meaning and worth to people whose lives are meaningless without the pile of tokens.

Now, Doug McMillon in not in that league. McMillon is an employee, not an owner. His wealth is measure in millions, not billions. To Logan (in the video), that’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.

Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon reportedly raked in $19.4 million in compensation in 2014. The typical Walmart associate, in contrast, starts at $9 an hour. This means that even with the modest pay increase won by Walmart workers earlier this year, McMillon still makes over 800 times more than this typical employee. Something is terribly wrong here.

True, the gap between CEO and worker pay has been an issue for decades. But it came into sharp focus as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Inappropriate compensation packages at financial services firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were identified as contributors to the crisis because they were said to encourage excessive risk taking by company executives. It is clear that when CEOs feel like they are playing with Monopoly money, it puts our entire economy in jeopardy.

So when the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 was passed to rein in Wall Street greed, it included a provision mandating that the Securities and Exchange Commission require corporations to disclose their CEO-to-worker pay ratio.

Seems straightforward enough, right?

Unfortunately, Wall Street is much better at doling out lavish compensation packages than disclosing them. The business community is claiming it would cost more than $185,000 and almost 1,000 hours of staff time per company to calculate the CEO-to-worker pay figure.

This is nonsense, plain and simple. Employers should already have this information on the books. Dodd-Frank asks companies to do some simple calculations, not put a man on Mars.

This is the picture Doug McMillon ought to have on his desk.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2015 at 0500 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Capitalism, Doug McMillon, Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.