That’s another trope of the statists, always eager to make political hay by capitalizing on envy. The AFL-CIO, for example, tosses around figures that purport to show that corporate presidents earn hundreds of times more than their employees.
In this piece, economist Mark Perry looks at the data. Instead of comparing the earnings of just a few CEOs of very large corporations with minimum wage workers (the technique of the unions), he looks at average compensation for all CEOs (most of whom head up small businesses) with the average compensation of all workers (very few people earn the minimum wage). Guess what? The ratio shrinks to less than four to one.