High wages, low wages, and morality

The Securities and Exchange Commission has just proposed that corporations disclose more information about executive compensation beyond salary, such as pensions and other perks.

"A small positive move," says Klinger. He advocates, among other things, that the directors of a firm should include not just executives from other companies, but also representatives of labor, the community, and others to better assure that business decisions take account of "stakeholders" other than company shareholders.

So far, though, rising income inequality has not aroused sufficient public indignation to prompt congressional moves to stem it.

Ms. Kern maintains it is "immoral" that so many Americans get up in the morning, work a full day, and then are paid so little they have to choose "between medicine, food, heat, or light."

ACORN campaigns with that theme have won such wide public support that 18 states and the District of Columbia have enacted higher minimum wage laws, from about $6.15 to $12 an hour.

But the federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in nine years. Action would directly help 7 percent of the workforce.

A think tank study released last week found that between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, the incomes of the country's highest-income families climbed substantially. Middle- and lower-income families, though, saw only modest increases in income and have begun to decline again despite relatively low unemployment. So today the income gap between the richest and poorest one-fifth of families is "significantly wider" than it was two decades ago, note the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, two nonprofit groups in Washington, D.C.

In past tough years, Congress has shared in economic suffering by cutting its own pay - in 1932 and 1783, for instance. Not so now. Since members of Congress last voted to boost the minimum wage, they have raised their own pay by 23 percent. Last October, the Senate voted 51 to 49 to hike the minimum wage, but it would have taken a supermajority of 60 votes to pass.

"I wonder what Adam Smith would have to say about that?" Klinger asks.

Soon Congress will consider making permanent a Republican tax measure that would fully repeal the federal estate tax - a tax that only hits a rich elite. This year, all estate assets worth less than $2 million per individual (and double that for a couple) are exempt from the estate tax. Only huge estates, one in 370 (0.27 percent), are subject to the tax.

Mr. Sherry of Let Justice Roll hopes that the "momentum" building at the state level for a legislated boost in the pay of the poor will carry over to the federal level. "People are seeing it more as an ethical, moral issue," he says.

Contrariwise, Kern sees "no hope for a federal minimum wage increase with this Congress and this administration."

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