The country's top CEOs earn 300 times what you do
The CEOs of the largest U.S. companies made 303 times what the average worker did in 2014, according to a report released Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank based in Washington, D.C. The ratio peaked in 2000 at 376 to 1, but it has inched back up as the economy recovers from the recession. The average pay for a CEO at one of the top 350 firms has increased 54.3 percent since 2009.
"The escalation in CEO pay was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in output," EPI President Lawrence Mishel told Fortune. "They didn't make the pie bigger, but they are taking a bigger piece of it. What that means is that everyone else has a smaller piece."
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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