Last fall, as the GOP and the Trump administration worked overtime to sell the American public on its package of tax cuts, Kevin Hassett, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, made a bold prediction: The average American household would see their annual income increase by $4,000-$9,000 due to the legislation's business tax cuts. Hassett also said he expected to see "an immediate jump in wage growth." And while most in the GOP were hesitant to go quite as far as Hassett, the promise that corporate tax cuts would boost worker pay was a central selling point of the plan. Most economists were skeptical of this promise.
So far, however, the promised wage growth has yet to materialize for most Americans. But according to a new report released this morning by Lawrence Misheland Jessica Schieder of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, there's one group of Americans who got a big raise in 2017: chief executive officers of large American firms.
In 2017, the "average CEO of the 350 largest firms in the United States received $18.9 million in compensation, a 17.6 percent increase over 2016," the report states. (By another measure, which includes stock options granted, average CEO compensation rose from $13.0 million in 2016, to $13.3 million in 2017.)
[For more on this story by DWYER GUNN, go to https://psmag.com/economics/ce...-a-big-raise-in-2017]
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