At what point does making a ton of money prove to be detrimental to the rest of society? How much income is too much? Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura rallies for the living wage in this video while also sounding off on the greed at the core of income inequality.
Ventura is the author of several books including American Conspiracies, which was recently released in its second edition.
Jesse Ventura: Wealth distribution is completely out of line today. In fact people have talked to me about the minimum wage, and I’ve shocked people and said maybe what we ought to have is a maximum wage. If someone makes a hundred million dollars a year, that’s not enough? What could you possibly need if you made a hundred million dollars every year? And the case in point, the Walton family, right? That owns Walmart. Each member of that family makes billions of dollars a year, and yet their employees have to be government subsidized by we the taxpayers because they don’t earn enough to not be subsidized. Something is gravely wrong with that. My position on that is, if you work a 40-hour workweek — I don’t give a damn what the job is — if you work 40 hours a week, you should get paid enough money so that you do not require any government subsidy at all. Now how you determine that or what that number is, we got to figure it out. But to me, if you work 40 hours a week shining shoes, washing dishes, whatever it might be, you should earn a living to where we, the government and the taxpayers, should not have to be subsidizing you.