Knock Me Over With A Feather

By BJ Bjornson

Admittedly, I don’t think this was too hard to figure out.

Chief executives in 35 of the top Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their "ideal salaries" in 2008, according to an analysis by a Purdue University researcher.

. . .

Fair pay for an average S&P 500 CEO should ideally be in the range of 8 to 16 times the lowest employee salary, according to Venkatasubramanian's calculations.

By contrast, average CEO pay ratios were about 11-to-1 in Japan, 15-to-1 in France, 20-to-1 in Canada and 22-to-1 in Britain in 2006.

Since the 1970s in the United States, the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest employee's salary has gone up to as high as 344-to-1 from about 40-to-1

Hmmm. One of those countries does seem to stand out a bit, doesn’t it?