I'd much rather work as a software engineer than a CEO.
1) The percent of income that those 350 CEOs have of the whole employee's income.
And more importantly:
2) The percent of wealth that those 350 CEOs have, compared to the whole US population.
And even more importantly:
3) How is wealth distributed in the US? Those CEOs are probably outclassed by other categories.
All this to say that trickle down does not work, at all.
Often times the argument starts with something like "rich people have to much money" and then talks about how we should take more money from them. I had a lot of respect for Bernie Sanders because he started with "we should do X good thing for society" and then he proposed a specific tax to pay for that thing. I think that is much better rhetoric than arguing that some people have to much.
A) Taxing high income will cause capital / investment flight.
B) Wealth trickles down.
A: could be true, but it does not warrant letting private investors take all profits without incurring in the necessary expenses, which are currently funded by the tax payer (disproportionately low-medium income workers), or simply not covered (health care).
B: This is, after several decades of lying to the electorate, patently false.
Can you expand on why inequality happens and some ideas to change/fix the causes?
So it seems like you are saying, tax the rich and do something to benefit the lower economic classes. What specific policies to you support that would benefit the lower economic classes?
The simplest one would be to reduce taxes which disproportionately impact those classes; moving the trust fund contributions currently made out of the employer share of payroll taxes to be drawn from general revenue would be one example.
Even though it's technically a business tax cut, is directly on a cost of employing people, making employing workers at any given wage cheaper for the employer, so that more of the employer cost goes to the employee.
A particular elegant way to address that is to realize that most of this wealth accumulation is expressed in terms of property. Fundamentally a relationship between two parties, the non-owners, and the current owner. The former who takes the opperunity cost of not having, and the owner who extracts the rent-value from having.
So one way to adress the fundamental issue is to compensate the former group for their opperynity cost cost by taxing the owner. The difference between the opportunity cost and extracted rent can be seen as the unique contribution of the current owner, but the rest could be distributed fairly among the non-owners as a dividend.
At best, your CEOs are getting an extra $40k per-year. Furthermore, your CEO salary is across the entire US, whereas your Bay Area engineers are going to be bleeding a significant chunk of their earning paying for rent compared to the median CEO; median national monthly rent for a one bedroom is ~$1k[5], but in San Jose, that's $2.1k[6]; so your CEO has another $13.2k per year
A median CEO nationally makes $50-70k more per year than your median SV software engineer.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm
[2]: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S...
[3]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-senior-soft...
[4]: https://www.linkedin.com/salary/software-engineer-salaries-i...
[5]: https://www.abodo.com/blog/2017-annual-rent-report/
[6]: https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data...
It looks like what your saying makes sense... until you start to control for location. Look at the chart titled, "Metropolitan areas with the highest employment level in this occupation" for both pages, and you'll see that for every locale included in both places, CEO pay is higher than GPs.
This is most likely because CEOs aren't evenly distributed with the population like GPs are (you can have one CEO at the top of 50k employees, but you need many more GPs than that for the same number of people).