Senator Obama made the claim during the debate that "You've got CEOs who are making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year." This sounded like hyperbole, so I put pencil to paper and came up with the following:
Note: I used the $7.50 per hour rate for simplicity, but technically the median hourly rate for workers in the US is probably more in the area of $15/hour. The median rate would seem to be the best statistical fit for the phrase "ordinary" workers. But I'm erring on the side of Senator Obama here.
40 Hour Work week
x $7.50/hr. rate for average worker
= $300/week wages
x 52 weeks/year
=$15,600/annual wages
$15,600 average workers wages
x6 (to get hourly CEO rate, 6 ten-minute periods/hour)
=$93,600 CEO/Hourly Rate
x 40 Hours/Week
=$3,744,000 CEO Weekly Wages
x 52 Weeks/Year
=$194,688,000 CEO Annual Rate
I'm not sure if I'm aware of any CEO's who are paid $200M per year, much less twice that amount.
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Senator Clinton again used her favorite technique of relating a story about a woman (and it's always a woman) who "grabbed her arm" and told her about the seriousness of some such issue or another. It could be about health care, the war in Iraq, the economy, whatever. Someone is always grabbing this woman by the arm and jawboning her about the issues.
My first question is where the heck is the Secret Service when all this grabbing of the candidate is going on? Second, does she ever listen to men while on the stump? Or do men have to grab her by that arm to get her attention? And where do you think the Secret Service would be then?
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I thought the Clinton crack about "Xeroxing change" was perfectly legitimate and right on target. The crowd applauded her seconds earlier when she said if Obama was positioning himself as the agent of change, it's perfectly valid to know what the nature of the change is and where it's coming from.
Obama is a bit of a Teflon candidate at this point and he may be able to use that shield to hold off Clinton and secure the Democratic nomination, but don't think for a moment that Senator McCain will extend him the same courtesy during the general campaign.
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