Liberals! Stop Posting This Chart!

Evidently this chart has become a popular post for Liberals on Facebook. However, as Politifact points out, the source of the information on the chart is not only unverified, but it contradicts other studies from Liberal think tanks:

We located a scanned version of the paper on the Internet, and it did appear to be written by Prof. Mark Kroll. His institution wasn’t listed, but after some additional searching, we found that Kroll had been teaching at the Louisiana Tech College of Business in 2005 and that he is now the business dean at the University of Texas at Brownsville. But it turns out he didn’t write the paper after all.  

"Actually, I am the ‘recipient’ of the paper you refer to," Kroll told us in an e-mail. "The paper was done as a class project by three of my students in a graduate class back in 2005. The 475-to-1 ratio that you reference is listed in a table in the paper the students wrote. They do not give a specific citation for the data in the table."  

The paper’s cover sheet fooled us -- as it fooled others -- because the professor’s name appears in the middle of the page, and the three students’ names appear together at the bottom in a less prominent spot. We tried to reach the co-authors -- Adam Choate, Dana Rowzee and Jerrod Tinsley, all of whom were working on their Master of Business Administration in 2005 -- but we did not hear back.  

So how about the substance of the chart? ...  

The most recent chart from the Economic Policy Institute shows a ratio of 185 to 1 for 2009. ...  

Meanwhile, the most recent ratio from the Institute for Policy Studies is also smaller -- for 2010, it was 325 to 1. (emphasis mine)

From the Economic Policy Institute:

From the Institute for Policy Studies:

As you can see, there is no need to throw bogus over-inflated numbers into public discourse. The real numbers are startling enough, especially given that, since the late 1970s, CEO pay has gone from 40x the average worker pay to 180x (Although it is worth noting that much of this increase occurred during the Clinton years)!

Politifact also linked to a few older posts on the issue:

From previous fact-checks, we knew that American CEOs are generously paid, and we had confirmed that for ordinary Americans, incomes are stagnating.

Politifact has also pointed out that "the typical white male worker's purchasing power has eroded by almost 11.5 percent in 37 years." I have also written before on how income inequality results in the popular argument that the rich pay the lion's share of taxes in the US.

Basically, there are plenty of very powerful figures and statistics which Liberal facebook-ers can post to make their case. So stop posting inaccurate ones!