Do you like the idea of tax hike on companies that pay their CEOs 100x their workers?

I cannot say at this time if I think it is a good thing to impose, but I do say that it is a fair proposition.

1. High salary / comp packages can be disbursed in such a way that just-taxation is tricky
   
2. Such a ratio is indicative of significant profits (i.e. such salaries are global market-rate, not subjective)
   
3. Corporations acting at this scale can be difficult to regulate or otherwise control, when their acts begin to exceed the history of legal contemplation.

Since these corporations are globally-impacting, their top-earners can domicile elsewhere, or can relocate their base of operations elsewhere... regardless of where top executives live.

Such a law cannot effectively be enacted without national or global transparency on changes in corporate structure, salaries, etc, that would happen after the effective-date of such legislation. At this time I would not be sure of the benefit of such legislation without also including such reporting / transparency mechanisms.

The responsibility of such reporting would fall to a California government office, since the corporate filings of those natures are already regulated by law under the SEC.

Also, this vote and discussion should link to the text of the bill, not to an opinion-piece article.

This sort of measure seems shortsighted, because it would bias itself very strongly against large companies which employ unskilled workers.

The larger a company gets, the more responsibility its leadership needs. The more responsibility you have within a company, the better you're paid. However, unskilled workers tend to earn near minimum wage no matter what, because they have little to no responsibility within the company; they're don't need to make any sort of company-impacting decisions or judgements.

Given that situation, it seems like this would be the sort of law which would punish companies for growing too large while still employing unskilled workers. Perversely, it would reward companies which employ mostly skilled or academic workers - like those found in tech companies. Each of those workers wields proportionally more responsibility in their organization, so the gap is not so large.

Worse, it completely ignores the reality of how companies operate. CEO's aren't even always paid a salary; see the $1 salary. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary . This sort of measure would only encourage bypassing it by funding their leadership with bonuses or stock or assets, instead of direct payment.

Finally, who is to say that this doesn't just increase the (already ridiculous) cost of doing business in California? Does anyone seriously think that a company wouldn't pass the tax on to its customers? Only the most monolithic companies could afford not to.

I understand the idea behind this misguided bill, it's trying to get more people into the middle class. But instead, it looks more like it would give fewer options for those looking to move up - if it even does anything at all.

Capitalism doesn't limit how much you can earn however fringe benefits should also be taxed otherwise tie the CEO's tax rate with their minimum wage. The higher the difference the higher the tax rate. Or at least tax their bonuses much higher.

Actually, that's such a vague concept...

How about this?

As long as corporations are considered people, why don't they tax them like people?

The income tax bracket for a person making a billion dollars a year is about the 80% bracket...

Let's start billing the corporations like they're people seeing as how they use that "person" nonsense to get away with all their other skulduggery.

It's harder to tax a company, than it is to tax an individual.