Notes from Evil Bender

 [Update: Ed Brayton has his own eloquent takedown of DaveScot. I suspect Mr. Brayton would disagree strongly with my conclusions, but it's nice to see someone with a much greater readership than my own taking down DS' terrible arguments. Thanks, Ed!]

Over at UncommonDescent, DaveScot is being an idiot again. (Thanks to Red State Rabble for the link) I can generally refute his idiocy without a huge biological background simply on logic. This time, though, he’s posting more directly about politics, and it’s even easier: all you need to refute him is a bit of basic knowledge of how liars work to conceal the truth and distort the issue. So, to DaveScot (who closed comments on this post so he wouldn’t need to listen to criticism) I say “bring it on.” Dave’s post has two main themes: that Jim Webb is wrong about Iraq and that he is wrong with his figures. I’ll deal with the first bit of drivel quickly, and then move on to the place where DaveScot combines horrible math with distortions and general bitching to create an argument that displays his usual level of intelligence:

As I was watching the Democratic response to President Bush’s State Of The Union speech tonight Senator Jim Webb played the United States Marine card three times (for himself, his brother, and his son all Marines). I take it personally when someone does that.

The first thing Webb does is claims to know better than the president and all the president’s advisors how to effectively fight terrorism because, well, Jim was a Marine in Vietnam.

Or possibly because the President’s Iraq policy is a huge failure? It seems DaveScot wants to attack Webb for using the argument from authority, when actually he is using it, claiming that despite the worsening situation on the ground, the President must know more than the vast majority of his generals, congress, his Allies and the American People, not to mention Malaki.

He does, however, dein to make one argument that doesn’t just assume Dubya is correct:

Here’s the deal Jim. In order to have an effective force in fighting guerilla [sic] and urban wars in Arab countries we need actual combat veterans seasoned in that type of warfare leading the unseasoned troops. Use your head, Jim. Now we have an effective force led by NCOs who know how to survive urban and guerilla [sic] wars in Arab countries. And Bush managed to build that force without losing 58,000 American lives as were sacrificed in Vietnam but rather limited the losses to 3,000. Use your head for something other than a place to put your hat, Jim. We needed a veteran ground combat force for the Middle Eastern theater. Now we have one. Now what happened to Russia in Afghanistan won’t happen to us.

You see? Those 3,000+ American deaths weren’t really young lives wasted in a war we engaged in illegally via lies and for an ever-shifting rationale, they were teaching us how to fight that same war better? So while the civil war their escalates, we should be happy, because our troops now have more experience fighting! Weeee!

No one mention to DaveScot that all those soldiers in Vietnam with combat experience didn’t let us win that war. But it doesn’t matter, they’ll let us win this one, er, somehow.

And then his argument gets even worse as he changes subject:

The next bit of cluelessness was Webb on the economy. He said

When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

This is just utter dreck.
You know this is going to be good, because he takes a widely agreed-upon figure (when we keep in mind that CEOs are generally thought of as executive officers of large corperations) and disputes it, since it justifiably makes American-style “capitalism” look terrible.

The average CEO salary in the United States today is $1.2 million according to a survey by Pearl Meyer & Partners mentioned on Money Central. What Webb failed to mention is that at the largest 50 companies the average is $10.7 million. Meanwhile the average worker salary in the U.S. was $37,000 in 2002 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So, he takes two different numbers from two different sources to make his point. That’s always a good start–he’s selected (for his own purposes) different estimates, and now he’ll treat those numbers as gospel in his desperate attempt to make CEOs look oppressed.

To be fair to DaveScot, there is some question about how to arrive at this figure. Does every CEO count? What about those who hold that title at very small companies that aren’t publicly traded? But DaveScot is cherry-picking here. He wants to claim that the executive/worker divide is unchanged in the last half century, so he takes a convenient number of $1.2 million, and doesn’t bother to figure out what it actually represents.

If you’re still with me, let me give you a couple of examples of how easily it is to manipulate this data. First of all, DaveScott’s number comes from a story that includes information he doesn’t see fit to mention:

According to the survey, the average CEO salary was unchanged at $1.2 million. The average long-term incentive, meanwhile, more than doubled to $2.7 million, and the average option grant fell 23% to $4 million.

DaveScot is reporting salary for a CEO as if that’s the bulk of their earnings (as it is for average workers), but it isn’t. It’s not meant to be–and that other money they take in is part of their “total cash compensation.” And if we take the above three numbers as the TCC (I don’t know what that number generally includes), we get an income disparity of more than 200 to 1 for CEOs, by those numbers alone. In addition, DaveScot’s number looks suspiciously like the base salary for executives in Fortune 500 Companies:

The typical salary in the top of the list is $1 million – $3 million (Immelt). The typical top cash bonus is $10 million – $15 million (Henry R. Silverman). The highest stock bonus is $20 million (Fuld). The highest option exercise have been in the range of $100 million – $200 million (Reuben Mark).

So we begin to see how DaveScot is using numbers to add false validity to his distortions.

Let’s look at another set of numbers to give context to DaveScot’s lies.

Figures published by the labour federation, the AFL-CIO, show how far the gap has grown. In 1980, a chief executive made $42 for every dollar earned by a blue-collar worker. By 1990, that gap was $85. But the real gains in the boardroom were made in the decade that followed as firms ramped up share options. By 2000, chief executives were earning $531 for every dollar taken home by a typical worker.

Another way of looking at the growth is that the compensation given to the top five executives in a company accounted for about 10% of that firm’s earnings in 2003, compared to 5% in 1995, according to a Harvard study.

Now keep in mind we’re looking at big companies, here, but comparing a CEO (if so they chose to qualify themselves) of a twenty person company doesn’t really give us a feel for the gap in big business between bosses and their employees. Think about the above numbers. The top five executives are taking up one dollar in every ten of earnings. That leaves nine dollars to pay everyone else, reward shareholders, and invest in growing the business. Talk about money congregating at the top.

Now prepare for DaveScot’s blubbering about how unfair it is to be an executive:Even worse, the average CEO loses 50% of his salary in state & local income taxes while the average worker loses 20%. So it’s really $600,000 vs. $30,000 which is a factor of 20. Wow. When take-home pay is compared the average CEO makes 20 times the average worker. Just like when Elvis was singing in the Army.

So now we’re comparing after-tax income. Wee. It must be tough to earn twenty times what your workers do. And of course that’s a lie too. If this were correct, we would expect that a median take-home salary that was basically unchanged in the last half-century would mean that the top earners would have roughly the same percentage of accumulated wealth that they did then. But that’s not what we see. Let’s look at what the wealth table really looks like:

Of course, you could argue that the richest people aren’t CEOs, but it’s clear that those who are really making money control way more than the rest of us.

What DaveScot’s doing is numerical slight-of-hand. He’s mixing his terms (he never bothers to discuss if he’s working with Median or Mean figures, by the way, which makes a huge difference), using sources designed to make his position look good, and overlooking what should be obvious to anyone who is looking: while the rich might be paying more taxes, they also control the vast majority of weath. If you, like me, are among the bottom 50% in terms of real wealth, then you should realize top 50% of the country is controlling about 35 times the wealth of all of us combined, and that the top 1% is controlling twelve times as much wealth as us put together.

And speaking of fair, the average CEO pays almost 100 times as much in taxes ($600,000 vs. $7,000) as the average worker. Some people might not call that fair as it’s unlikely the CEO is using 100 times as much in government services as the average worker.

Just consider the implications if DaveScot’s numbers are correct. If CEOs are really making only 32 times what their workers are, and art paying 100 times as much in taxes, why, it’s amazing they are able to keep ahead at all, much less consolidate their wealth so effectively. Unless maybe it’s easier to stay rich than to get rich (gasp!). For all DaveScot’s bitching about how unfair it is to be wealthy, wealthy people continue to stay wealthy and the rest of us continue to see our piece of the pie shrink. Real wages for workers have not risen significantly over the last few decades, and CEO salaries continue to rise, despite DaveScot’s obfuscation.

Now you can disagree with me about the implications of this number, and many of you will. But even if you don’t favor income redistribution (even if you think, like DaveScott seems to, that taxes should be flat or even regressive), note that there is no reason to think that wealth distribution is anything but a disaster for those in the lower half of the bracket.

And even that group of the US population is way better off than the average worker worldwide.

DaveScot ends by demanding an apology from Webb. I’ll end by doing the same for DaveScot: you lied, manipulated numbers, left out data and worked to convince us that when our bosses earn in a year more than most of us will see in a lifetime, that should not be a concern. DaveScot, when will you apologize to the workers of America for not challenging the assumption that it’s okay for the top 10% to control 60% of the weath?