BIDEN'S BEAR MARKET PROMOTES EQUITY.

Common Dreams regular Sam Pizzigati never fails to amuse and entertain.  "The distribution of income and wealth will remain ridiculously top-heavy until we start limiting the 'rewards' gushing into corporate executive suites."  Income is a flow and wealth is a stock, and "ridiculously top-heavy" is a seriously subjective term.  Never mind.  He's on a roll.

Corporate chiefs at the 350 top American firms that trade on the stock market last year realized an average $27.8 million in compensation, an 11.1-percent increase over their previous year's pay and a record 399 times more than the take-home of typical American workers.

Some context can help here. Back in 1965, top U.S. CEOs averaged just 20 times more than the annual compensation of typical American workers. In 1989, a quarter-century later, that gap was still only running 59-to-1. The gap since then has multiplied nearly seven-fold.

Part of that might be pay-for-performance, which now relies on stock appreciation rather than on salaries or bonuses.  That means a great deal of net worth has evaporated just this year.  There's no offsetting benefit to people who had no net worth to begin with, but simple arithmetic says there's less wealth being held, and there's less of it held by the wealthiest people.  "And thus, understanding the dynamics of capital accumulation, or wealth concentration, might be much more work than simply noting the presence of either."

It might be that other forces are at work affecting wealth holdings.  Mr Pizzigati attempts an inter-country comparison.

The United States last year averaged just over $579,000 in wealth per adult, almost double France's $322,000 average. But the most typical—the median—French adult held a net worth of just under $140,000, almost $50,000 more than the wealth of the most typical U.S. adult.

Average Danes, Canadians, and Dutch adults—to give just a few more examples—last year all held less wealth than average Americans. But the wealth of the most typical adults in Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands all towered over the wealth of the most typical U.S. adults by at least 53 percent.

In his view, that's not a good thing for the United States. "In the United States, our grand enterprises have essentially become the world's fiercest engines of inequality. We need to change that."  Maybe.  What are those French, Danish, Canadian, or Dutch grand enterprises producing?