ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
One month after they voted to raise tuition as much as 9 percent, the Georgia Board of Regents approved salary increases to the presidents of Georgia's colleges and universities. Some got as much as a 43 percent increase. The presidents of Georgia Tech and Georgia State universities each now make more than $1 million a year. Meanwhile, rank-and-file state employees were given a 1 percent pay raise.
Public school teachers and other school support staff can’t get a decent raise while just last month the DeKalb County School Board approved a three-year, $300,000 contract for superintendent finalist R. Stephen Green. He will receive the second highest base salary among superintendents in the metropolitan Atlanta area behind Atlanta Public Schools chief Meria Carstarphen, who receives $375,000.
No outcry there, but try arguing for a $15 minimum wage for people who work at McDonald's or Wal-Mart.
Last Saturday former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign by drawing parallels between another president, Franklin Roosevelt, and the economic policies of her husband’s and President Obama’s.
Roosevelt, Clinton said, called on every American to do his or her part, and every American answered. Quoting Roosevelt, she said, there is no mystery about what it takes to make America strong: “Equality of opportunity, jobs for those who can work, the ending of special privilege for the few.”
Several days later, billionaire Donald Trump launched his campaign president, touting, what else? His wealth.
“I have a total net worth of $8,737,540,000,” he said to applause.
Clinton’s no slouch. In 2012, the last year for which she disclosed finances, her net worth was estimated to be between $5 million and $25 million.
America isn’t running the way it should.
The time has come to finally set things right, to stop the bleeding of poor and middle class families who are doing what they can to make ends meets, to say enough is enough to the multi-million-dollar paychecks the top 1 percent collect.
Reports show that CEOs across the country earn on average $11.7 million a year – an eye-popping 331 times the average worker's annual income of $35,293. That's why rank and file workers take extra shifts, work two jobs and postpone home repairs because often what they really need is a little food on the table.
Here’s the truth: Americans love the rags-to-riches, rugged individualism that becoming a millionaire suggests. The idea is that these masters of the universe are unique outliers, when in fact they are often insiders who have rigged the system for their own gain.
Exorbitant salaries for university presidents are modeled on the corporate template in which board members give huge, often undeserved raises to CEOs knowing they will soon be asking for the same type of raises, says Charles Gallagher, chairman of La Salle University’s sociology department.
“Interlocking directorates or CEOs being on many boards mean these men are swimming in the same pond with those who will vote on their compensation packages,” he said. “University board of trustees, many who are these very CEOs, have imported this compensation model with the justification that if we don’t pay a giant salary to a university president they will jump to the private sector where they can make real money.”
Meanwhile, a common argument to raising minimum wage is that it will hurt the economy, increase unemployment and cost jobs.
According to Allen Sanderson, a senior lecturer in the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, the current minimum wage serves as an anti-poverty program.
“I want people to have more command in the workplace, and I want them to have much more than $7.25 an hour,” he was quoted as saying in the Chicago Tribune. “I just don’t want McDonald’s to be the place where they can make that.”
But Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, says the discrepancy in pay really amounts to our messed up values.
“Modern left-wing liberals — even the rich ones — seem to value the poor,” Epstein said. “Modern right-wing conservatives — especially the rich ones — seem only to pay lip service to the poor. Empathy, like all traits, varies from one extreme to the other; that will never change.”
Epstein contends we humans are fundamentally selfish. And despite establishing religions and laws to try to suppress our selfish tendencies, they manifest themselves predictably in the distribution of wealth.
Social programs only help for a while.
“We are in another free-fall period now, when the ideals and moral constraints of previous generations have been largely abandoned,” Epstein said. “This will continue, presumably, until it gets so out of hand that the proletariat, so to speak, once again rises up and puts new constraints in place.”
Don’t hold your breath. Ultimately, natural tendencies rule.
But we can hope. I hope we’ll see more compassion for the poor and those in the middle still struggling. I hope we’ll finally push past our own greed and say, I have enough. Take this and help someone who actually needs it.
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