Here is a news article: Astronomical gap between the pay of workers and bosses exposed in report on earnings of America’s top 350 CEOs

 The chief executives of America’s top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute.

 The rise came after the bosses of America’s largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees’ wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year.

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 The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to one; that figure had risen to 58 to one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker.

 CEO pay dipped in the early 2000s and during the last recession, but has been rising rapidly since 2009. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1% in the dust. The bosses of large firms now earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1%.

 The astronomical gap between the remuneration of workers and bosses has been brought into sharper focus by a new financial disclosure rule that forces companies to publish the ratio of CEO to worker pay.

 Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one. The average Walmart worker earned $19,177 in 2017 while CEO Doug McMillon took home $22.8m – a ratio of 1,188 to one.

 But the average is skewed by outliers, particularly the tech companies, where the CEO founders may own large chunks of the company but not take home much in compensation, relatively speaking.

 Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, was paid close to $82,000 last year and his total compensation including security was about $1.7m in 2017 while the average Amazon worker earned $28,446 – a ratio of 59 to one for his entire package and just three to one counting salary only.

 But neither man is waiting on his monthly paycheck. Bezos’s personal fortune now tops $154bn while Zuckerberg’s is close to $66bn, according to Forbes.

 The compensation bonanza was driven by stock-related components of CEO compensation such as stock awards or the opportunity to cash in stock options, said Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.

 But the rise in their compensation can not be explained entirely by rising stock markets. CEO rewards have outstripped both stock prices and corporate profits, EPI found. Between 1978 and 2017 CEO compensation has increased by 979%. Over the same period the S&P 500 Index of the US’s largest companies grew 637%. The typical workers’ pay package rose just 11.2% over the same time frame.

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 “Over time I think there has been a loosening of norms.” said Mishel. “Everyone wants to believe their CEO is one of the best, so they look around and see what everyone else is being paid and then they pay them a lot more. They think everyone is better than average.”

 The outsize pay packets have had a direct impact on people down the corporate ladder, Mishel claims. “The redistribution of wages to the top 5%, but particularly the top 1%, affected the wage growth of the bottom 90%.

 “As a mathematical matter, had there not been the redistribution upward – to the top 5%, but which is mostly about to the top 1% – the wages of the bottom 90% could have grown twice as fast as it actually did.” ||||| BOX A Abnormalities in the fair value measure of stock awarded under plan-based awards in 2017 In calculating the value of CEO compensation based on stock-related awards for this year’s report, it became obvious that a significant number of firms were missing values in the raw Compustat data for the “fair value” of stock awarded under plan-based awards (stock_awards_fv). Compustat representatives confirmed that there were abnormalities in the most recent year’s data. These missing data for 2017 caused our measure of CEO compensation to artificially fall (in nominal terms) by nearly $2 million on average per CEO. In contrast, the value of a comparable variable for stock awards (not adjusted for “fair value”) grew by nearly $1 million per CEO. To compensate for the missing data, we relied on trends in the cost of stock awards that were charged to the company (stock_awards) for the same firm in the first half of 2016 and of 2017. Stock awards are a reliable metric of trends for the fair value of stock awards: Over the last 10 years, the value of stock awards and the fair value of stock awards were within $1,000 of each other roughly 62 percent of the time. Not surprisingly, therefore, the levels and changes in the two variables are similar. Consequently, where data for fair value values were missing in the 2017 data, we computed the percentage growth in the cost of stock awards (stock_awards) between 2016 and 2017 and applied that growth to the previous year’s fair value number for that firm to obtain an estimate of the fair value of stock awards in 2017.

 CEO compensation reported in Table 1, as well as throughout the report, is the average compensation (in 2017 dollars) of the CEOs of the 350 publicly owned U.S. firms (i.e., firms that sell stock on the open market) with the largest revenue each year for which executive compensation data are available. For comparison, Table 1 also presents the average annual compensation (wages and benefits of a full-time, full-year worker) of a private-sector production/nonsupervisory worker (a group covering more than 80 percent of payroll employment), allowing us to compare CEO compensation with that of a “typical” worker. From 1995 onward, the table also identifies the average annual compensation of the production/nonsupervisory workers corresponding to the key industry of the firms included in the sample. We take this compensation as a proxy for the pay of typical workers in these particular firms and use it to calculate the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio for each firm.

 The history of CEO compensation since the 1960s is as follows. Although the stock market—as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 Index and shown in Table 1—fell by roughly half between 1965 and 1978, CEO pay increased by 78.7 percent. Average worker pay saw relatively strong growth over that period (relative to subsequent periods, not relative to CEO pay or the pay of other earners at the top of the wage distribution). Annual worker compensation grew by 19.9 percent from 1965 to 1978, only about a fourth as fast as CEO compensation growth.

 CEO compensation grew strongly throughout the 1980s but exploded in the 1990s. It peaked in 2000, at about $21.0 million, a 261 percent increase over just five years earlier in 1995 and a 1,206 percent increase over 1978. This latter increase even exceeded the growth of the booming stock market (513 percent for the S&P 500 and 439 percent for the Dow) between 1978 and 2000. In stark contrast to both the stock market and CEO compensation, private-sector worker compensation increased just 0.7 percent over the same period.

 The fall in the stock market in the early 2000s after the bubble burst led to a substantial paring back of CEO compensation. By 2007, however, when the stock market had mostly recovered, average CEO compensation reached $19.5 million, just $1.5 million less than its 2000 level.

 The stock market decline during the 2008 financial crisis also set CEO compensation tumbling, as it had in the early 2000s. After 2009, CEO compensation (measured using options realized) resumed an upward trajectory. It stalled from 2013 to 2016 (rising in 2013 but falling in 2015 and 2016) and then grew 17.8 percent in 2017 to attain a level just 3.3 percent below the 2007 (pre–financial crisis) level. (When measured using stock options granted, CEO compensation flattened starting in 2014.)

 Note that Table 1 provides a projection for data for 2017. The data available for 2017 are limited to the executive compensation disclosed by firms filing proxy statements through June of 2017. To provide data for CEO compensation in 2017 that are consistent with the historical data, we construct our estimates by looking at the growth of compensation from 2016 to 2017 using the first-half-year samples of data available each year and then applying that growth rate to the compensation for 2016 based on the full-year sample. This method corrects for the fact that full-year samples show higher compensation than samples for the first half of a year. It allows us to avoid artificially lowering the estimated change in this year’s CEO compensation relative to last year’s. Using the data through the first half for both years, average CEO compensation (based on stock options realized) was $17.9 million in 2017, up $2.7 million (17.6 percent) from the $15.2 million average in the first half of 2016. Using the value of options granted reveals a 1.7 percent increase, from $13.0 million in 2016 to $13.3 million in 2017.

 We use the projected 2017 CEO compensation as the basis for examining changes in CEO compensation over time. For the period 1978–2017, CEO compensation based on options realized increased about 1,070 percent—more than 60 percent faster than stock market growth (either the Dow Jones or S&P 500) and substantially faster than the painfully slow 11.2 percent growth in the typical worker’s compensation over the same period. CEO compensation based on the value of stock options granted grew 979 percent over this period. CEO compensation in 2017 remained below its peak in 2000, which occurred at the end of a strong economic boom that included huge growth in the stock market that many believed reflected a technology stock bubble. The run-up in stock prices had a corresponding effect on CEO compensation. When the bubble burst, CEO compensation was deflated as well.

 Figure A shows how CEO compensation measured using realized stock options historically fluctuated in tandem with the stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, confirming that CEOs tend to cash in their options when stock prices are high. The financial crisis of 2008 and the accompanying stock market tumble knocked CEO compensation based on realized stock options down 44 percent from 2007 to 2009. By 2014 the stock market had recouped all of the ground lost in the downturn. Not surprisingly, CEO compensation based on realized stock options also made a strong recovery. From 2014 to 2016, however, CEO pay based on realized stock options deteriorated, a departure from earlier trends. The sharp spike in CEO compensation in 2017 reestablished the close long-term connection between stock market growth and CEO compensation. As shown in the next section, growth in CEO compensation in 2017 was driven by the stock-related components of CEO pay (stock awards and realized stock options).

 Figure A CEO realized direct compensation and the S&P 500 index (2017 dollars), 1965–2017 Year CEO compensation (in millions of 2017 dollars) S&P 500 index 1965 0.90 588.33 1966 0.97 552.72 1967 1.04 578.84 1968 1.12 596.20 1969 1.13 566.99 1970 1.14 460.14 1971 1.15 521.24 1972 1.17 561.61 1973 1.18 520.11 1974 1.25 364.44 1975 1.33 350.38 1976 1.42 392.47 1977 1.51 354.96 1978 1.61 325.34 1979 1.71 318.46 1980 1.81 330.07 1981 1.91 325.30 1982 2.02 286.82 1983 2.14 368.73 1984 2.26 353.97 1985 2.40 398.42 1986 2.53 495.49 1987 2.68 581.57 1988 2.84 519.99 1989 3.00 605.33 1990 3.63 597.57 1991 4.40 648.20 1992 5.32 698.98 1993 5.61 740.60 1994 4.54 739.60 1995 5.83 849.73 1996 7.60 1,024.45 1997 11.55 1,306.26 1998 16.87 1,601.74 1999 15.22 1,917.74 2000 21.05 1,994.38 2001 11.59 1,622.54 2002 10.09 1,329.52 2003 13.00 1,262.44 2004 14.69 1,439.90 2005 17.80 1,487.05 2006 19.18 1,563.53 2007 19.50 1,713.85 2008 13.70 1,363.14 2009 10.98 1,062.95 2010 12.95 1,257.38 2011 13.26 1,355.47 2012 15.40 1,444.33 2013 15.90 1,696.11 2014 16.84 1,959.66 2015 16.56 2,087.65 2016 16.03 2,094.65 2017 18.86 2,397.52 ChartData Download data The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel. The data underlying the figure. Notes: CEO annual compensation is computed using the “options realized” compensation series, which includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options realized, and long-term incentive payouts for CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms ranked by sales. Projected value for 2017 is based on the change in CEO pay as measured from June 2016 to June 2017 applied to the full-year 2016 value. Source: Authors’ analysis of data from Compustat’s ExecuComp database and the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

 The normally tight relationship between overall stock prices and CEO compensation, as shown in Figure A, casts doubt on the theory that CEOs are enjoying high and rising pay because their individual productivity is increasing (because they head larger firms, adopted new technology, or other reasons). CEO compensation often grows strongly when the overall stock market rises and individual firms’ stock values rise along with it. This is a marketwide phenomenon, not one of improved performance of individual firms: Most CEO pay packages allow pay to rise whenever the firm’s stock value rises and permit CEOs to cash out stock options regardless of whether the rise in the firm’s stock value was exceptional relative to comparable firms in the same industry.

 Understanding the growth in CEO compensation in 2017

 Analyses of the underlying components of CEO compensation indicate that the two items closely linked to stocks and stock prices (realized value from exercising stock options and stock awards) fueled the sharp jump in CEO compensation in 2017. In contrast, average salaries among the CEOs in our sample fluctuated only marginally since 2007, and average bonuses (which have become more volatile) accounted for less than 5 percent of executive compensation in recent years.

 To analyze the shifts in the components of CEO compensation from 2016 to 2017 we compared compensation from the first half of 2017 with that of the comparable period in 2016. Figure B shows the average value of each of the main components of CEO compensation relative to total realized compensation in a given year, i.e., shares of total compensation. The value of exercised stock options accounted for the vast majority (78.9 percent) of the year-over-year growth in CEO compensation from 2016 to 2017 and grew by 47.1 percent. By contrast, the value realized on options exercised fell more than 15 percent between 2013 and 2016, a period when overall CEO compensation was essentially flat. The sharp growth in realized stock options in 2017 occurred as executives cashed out their accumulated unexercised options, as indicated by the sharp decline in unexercised stock options. In other words, CEOs cashed in on a rising stock market in 2017 (up 15–19 percent, depending on the stock index, as shown in Table 1—much faster growth than in the previous two years). The value of options exercised was still lower than at its peak (in 2007).

 Figure B Stock awards and the value realized on exercised stock options account for a vast majority of CEO compensation: Components of average realized compensation among CEOs within our sample, 2007–2017 Year Average salary Average bonus Average nonequity incentive plan compensation Average value realized on options exercised Average fair value of stock awarded 2007 $1,346,393 $742,927 $2,663,597 $9,805,930 $4,944,241 2008 $1,333,217 $678,313 $2,142,927 $4,673,330 $4,876,513 2009 $1,335,495 $359,484 $2,442,653 $2,936,632 $3,909,177 2010 $1,351,373 $528,120 $2,829,082 $3,824,305 $4,417,024 2011 $1,336,275 $540,940 $2,807,828 $3,893,601 $4,684,849 2012 $1,283,006 $599,281 $2,457,678 $5,953,837 $5,106,968 2013 $1,291,989 $451,454 $2,632,894 $6,060,143 $5,466,304 2014 $1,296,896 $431,519 $2,765,571 $6,137,112 $6,212,254 2015 $ 1,313,024 $388,483 $2,911,417 $5,734,515 $6,216,629 2016 $1,296,953 $388,351 $2,676,494 $5,138,992 $6,528,952 FH 2016 $1,273,689 $374,549 $2,624,766 $4,487,770 $6,439,311 FH 2017 $1,239,849 $323,007 $2,734,793 $6,601,256 $6,980,648 ChartData Download data The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel. The data underlying the figure. Notes: “FH” denotes preliminary values from the “first half” of the year. Source: Authors’ analysis of data from Compustat’s ExecuComp database Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

 The other stock-related compensation component, the fair value of stock awarded, accounted for 40.7 percent of CEO compensation in 2016 and grew by 8.4 percent. Growth of stock awards accounted for 20.2 percent of the growth of CEO compensation from 2016 to 2017. The two stock-related components together accounted for nearly all (99.1 percent) of the growth of CEO compensation from 2016 to 2017.

 Smaller components of CEO compensation stagnated or fell. Both salaries and bonuses declined, by 2.7 and 13.8 percent, respectively. These components accounted for 10.5 percent of CEO compensation in 2016. Nonequity incentive plan compensation, or long-term incentives, accumulated by CEOs accounted for 16.7 percent of total realized compensation in 2016. This component of realized compensation rose 4.2 percent.

 These recent year-over-year trends largely echo longer-term trends. Nearly half of the growth in realized CEO compensation since 2009 came from increases in the value of options exercised; another two-thirds reflected the growth in stock awards. These components of CEO compensation together accounted for more than all the growth because the remaining components declined: the salaries and bonuses provided to CEOs fell between 2009 and 2017.

 Trends in the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio

 Table 1 presents historical and current trends in the ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation, using both measures of CEO compensation. This ratio, which illustrates the increased divergence between CEO and worker pay over time, is computed in two steps. The first step is to construct, for each of the 350 largest U.S. firms, the ratio of the CEO’s compensation to the annual average compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers in the key industry of the firm (data on the pay of workers at individual firms are not available). The second step is to average that ratio across all 350 firms.

 The last two columns in Table 1 show the resulting ratio for both measures of CEO pay. We adjust the ratio for 2017 to reflect the percentage point growth between the first-half-year samples in 2016 and 2017 and apply that growth to the ratio estimated for the full-year sample in 2016, in order to make the 2017 ratio consistent with the historical data. Trends before 1995 are based on the changes in average top-company CEO and economywide private-sector production/nonsupervisory worker compensation. The trends are presented in Figure C.

 Figure C CEOs make 312 times more than typical workers: CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, 1965–2017 Year CEO-to-worker compensation ratio based on options realized CEO-to-worker compensation ratio based on options granted 1965 20.0 14.5 1966 21.1 15.3 1967 22.3 16.2 1968 23.6 17.2 1969 23.3 23.3 1970 23.0 23.0 1971 22.8 22.8 1972 22.5 22.5 1973 22.2 16.1 1974 23.5 23.5 1975 25.0 25.0 1976 26.5 26.5 1977 28.1 28.1 1978 29.7 21.6 1979 31.6 23.0 1980 33.6 24.4 1981 35.7 26.0 1982 38.0 27.6 1983 40.4 29.4 1984 42.9 31.2 1985 45.6 33.2 1986 48.5 35.3 1987 51.5 37.5 1988 54.8 39.8 1989 58.2 42.3 1990 70.5 51.2 1991 85.3 62.0 1992 103.2 75.1 1993 106.1 94.7 1994 81.9 108.6 1995 112.3 123.2 1996 141.4 166.5 1997 207.5 217.0 1998 277.0 274.9 1999 248.1 265.1 2000 343.5 360.5 2001 194.1 303.1 2002 176.5 222.1 2003 219.2 217.0 2004 251.6 221.8 2005 299.0 229.6 2006 318.6 235.3 2007 327.4 226.9 2008 227.3 214.7 2009 187.8 175.7 2010 219.3 197.1 2011 225.6 206.5 2012 266.2 199.2 2013 278.6 204.7 2014 284.0 213.4 2015 271.6 208.5 2016 270.1 219.9 2017 311.7 220.7 ChartData Download data The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel. The data underlying the figure. Notes: CEO annual compensation is computed using the “options realized” and “options granted” compensation series for CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms ranked by sales. The “options realized” series includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options realized, and long-term incentive payouts. The “options granted” series includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options granted, and long-term incentive payouts. Projected value for 2017 is based on the change in CEO pay as measured from June 2016 to June 2017 applied to the full-year 2016 value. Projections for compensation based on options granted and options realized are calculated separately. “Typical worker” compensation is the average annual compensation of the workers in the key industry of the firms in the sample. Source: Authors’ analysis of data from Compustat’s ExecuComp database, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics data series, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis NIPA tables Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

 The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) now requires publicly owned firms to provide a metric for the ratio of CEO compensation to that of the median worker, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010. Those ratios differ from those in this report in several ways. First, because of limitations in data availability, the measure of worker compensation in our ratios reflects workers in a firm’s key industry, not workers actually working for the firm. Second, our measure reflects an exclusively domestic workforce; it excludes the compensation of workers in other countries who work for the firm. Third, our metric is based on hourly compensation annualized to reflect a full-time, full-year worker (i.e., multiplying the hourly rate by 2,080). In contrast, the measures firms provide to the SEC can be part-year or part-time workers. As a result, comparisons across firms reflect not only pay differences but also differences in annual work hours. There is value in the new metrics provided to the SEC, but the measures we rely on allow us to make better comparisons across firms and across time. Box B provides more information on the new ratios firms are providing to the SEC.

 BOX B CEO-to-worker pay ratios: The new SEC rule and the EPI methodology Beginning in 2018, all publicly traded companies are required to disclose CEO total compensation alongside the median annual total compensation of all employees other than the CEO in annual proxy statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, they are to provide the ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation (SEC 2015). Advocates, investors, and researchers alike have welcomed the disclosure of this information, because these disclosures offer previously unavailable insight into compensation inequality within firms. Historically, constructing a firm-specific CEO-to-worker pay ratio was impossible without the cooperation of the firm, although sector-specific estimates were possible (see Mishel and Schieder 2017). The new CEO-to-worker compensation ratios contained in this year’s proxies shine a ray of sunlight onto the compensation of the typical worker. According to the authors of a report titled Rewarding or Hoarding? An Examination of Pay Ratios Revealed by Dodd-Frank, from the office of Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), “These new data give us a much clearer picture as to which corporations are sharing the wealth and which are not” (Staff of Congressman Keith Ellison 2018). Fierce business resistance to the mandate to report the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio watered down their potential use. Many corporations implausibly contended that constructing these ratios was too difficult. The SEC gave these claims far too much credence, providing firms tremendous leeway in how to construct the ratios. This SEC capitulation diminished the utility of these new median worker compensation measures for making comparisons across firms and will affect the utility of comparing them over time when additional years of data are available. Specifically, the SEC’s rule grants firms significant discretion in reporting median worker pay, which makes the reported ratios incompatible across firms. A company’s reported “median worker” may, for example, work part time or full time, reside in the U.S. or abroad, and have worked for the firm for a limited number of weeks during the previous year. The data on median compensation are not provided on a per hour basis or annualized to that of a full-time, full-year worker. Without such information, or simply the annual hours worked by the median worker, it is not possible to standardize the compensation for comparisons across firms. In addition, firms may not adhere to the same metric each year, limiting the ability to make historical comparisons in the future. Given these limitations, this year’s annual EPI examination of CEO compensation will once again provide an annual estimate of CEO-to-worker pay. Our methodology (described in Sabadish and Mishel 2013) has a number of advantages over the SEC’s calculated ratio. First, our methodology compares CEO compensation to the median worker in the main industry of the CEO’s company. It thereby eliminates artificial reductions in the CEO-to-worker pay ratio that could arise from the extensive use of subcontracting. Second, our worker compensation series reflects annualized compensation (multiplying an estimate of hourly compensation by 2,080 hours), eliminating the ambiguity that arises when weeks worked and hours per week are not specified or differ across firms. This assumption also makes our ratio a conservative estimate of the true ratio as measured by the figures reported to the SEC. Third, our analysis captures the ratio of CEO compensation to U.S. domestic workers, which provides comparability that the SEC required ratios do not provide. Fourth, our series is able to extend back to 1965, providing an opportunity to analyze trends in executive compensation over time. The consistent basis of the measurement of our ratios permits historical comparisons on a year-to-year basis. These (and other) benefits justify the continued production of our CEO-to-worker pay series—although it is our hope that with time the ambiguities of the SEC ratio will be addressed and adjusted, to produce a reliable time series for investors and the public to use.

 In terms of CEO compensation based on realized stock options, CEOs of major U.S. companies earned 20 times more than a typical worker in 1965. This ratio grew to 30-to-1 in 1978 and 58-to-1 by 1989. It surged in the 1990s, hitting 344-to-1 in 2000, at the end of the 1990s recovery. The fall in the stock market after 2000 reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., realized stock options) and caused CEO compensation to tumble in 2002, to 177 times typical worker pay, before beginning to rise again in 2003. CEO compensation recovered to a level of 327 times worker pay by 2007, almost back to its 2000 level. The financial crisis of 2008 and accompanying stock market decline reduced CEO compensation between 2007 and 2009, as discussed above, and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio fell in tandem. By 2014 the stock market had recouped all of the value it had lost following the financial crisis, and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in 2014 had recovered to 284-to-1. The fall in CEO compensation between 2014 and 2016 caused the CEO-to-worker pay ratio to fall to 270-to-1; the sharp upward spike in CEO compensation in 2017 lifted the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio to 312-to-1. Although the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio remains below the values achieved earlier in the 2000s at the peak of the stock market bubble, it is far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

 The pattern using the CEO compensation measure that values stock options as they are granted is similar. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio peaked in 2000, at 361-to-1 even higher than the ratio with the stock-options-realized measurement. The fall from 2000 to 2007 was steeper than for the other measure, hitting 227-to-1 in 2007. The stock market decline during the financial crisis drove the ratio down to 176-to-1 in 2009. It recovered to 213-to-1 by 2014 and remained flat thereafter, rising to 221-to-1 in 2017. This level is far lower than its peak in 2000 but still far greater than the 1989 ratio of 42-to-1 or the 1978 ratio of 22-to-1.

 Does dramatically high CEO pay simply reflect the market for skills?

 This section reviews competing explanations for the extraordinary rise in CEO compensation over the past several decades. CEO compensation has grown a great deal since 1965, but so has the pay of other high-wage earners. To some analysts, this suggests that the dramatic rise in CEO compensation was driven largely by the demand for the skills of CEOs and other highly paid professionals. In this interpretation, CEO compensation is being set by the market for “skills” or “talent,” not by managerial power or rent-seeking behavior. This explanation lies in contrast to that offered by Bebchuk and Fried (2004), who claim that the long-term increase in CEO pay is a result of managerial power.

 One prominent example of the “it is other professions, too” argument comes from Kaplan (2012a, 2012b). In the prestigious 2012 Martin Feldstein Lecture at the National Bureau of Economic Research, he claimed:

 Over the last 20 years, then, public company CEO pay relative to the top 0.1 percent has remained relatively constant or declined. These patterns are consistent with a competitive market for talent. They are less consistent with managerial power. Other top income groups, not subject to managerial power forces, have seen similar growth in pay. (Kaplan 2012a, 4)

 In a follow-up paper for the Cato Institute, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Kaplan expanded this point:

 The point of these comparisons is to confirm that while public company CEOs earn a great deal, they are not unique. Other groups with similar backgrounds—private company executives, corporate lawyers, hedge fund investors, private equity investors and others—have seen significant pay increases where there is a competitive market for talent and managerial power problems are absent. Again, if one uses evidence of higher CEO pay as evidence of managerial power or capture, one must also explain why these professional groups have had a similar or even higher growth in pay. It seems more likely that a meaningful portion of the increase in CEO pay has been driven by market forces as well. (Kaplan 2012b, 21)

 The argument that CEO compensation is being set by the market for “skills” does not square with the data. Bivens and Mishel (2013) address the larger issue of the role of CEO compensation in generating income gains at the very top and conclude that substantial rents are embedded in executive pay. According to them, CEO pay gains are not the result of a competitive market for talent but rather reflect the power of CEOs to extract concessions.

 We draw on and update their analysis to show that CEO compensation grew far faster than compensation of very highly paid workers over the last few decades, which suggests that the market for skills was not responsible for the rapid growth of CEO compensation. To reach this finding, we use Kaplan’s series on CEO compensation and compare it with the wages of top wage earners rather than the household income of the top 0.1 percent, as Kaplan did. The wage benchmark seems the most appropriate one, because it avoids issues of household demographics (e.g., changes in two-earner couples) and limits the income to labor income (i.e., excludes capital income). We update Kaplan’s series beyond 2010 using the growth of CEO compensation in our own series. This analysis finds, contrary to Kaplan, that the compensation of CEOs has far outpaced that of very highly paid workers, the top 0.1 percent of earners.

 Table 2 shows the ratio of the average compensation of CEOs of large firms (the series developed by Kaplan, incorporating stock options realized) to the average annual earnings of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners (based on a series developed by Kopczuk, Saez, and Song [2010] and updated by Mishel and Wolfe [2017]). The comparison is presented as a simple ratio and logged (to convert to a “premium,” defined as the relative pay differential between two groups). Both the simple ratios and the log ratios understate the relative pay of CEOs, because CEO pay is a nontrivial share of the denominator, a bias that has probably grown over time as CEO relative pay has grown; removing top CEOs’ pay from the top 0.1 percent category would reduce the average for the broader group.

 Table 2 CEO-to-top-0.1-percent and college-to-high-school ratios, 1979–2016 Ratio Log ratio CEO compensation to: College wages to: CEO compensation to: College wages to: Top 0.1% wage earners High school hourly wages Top 0.1% wage earners High school hourly wages 1979 3.22 1.41 1.170 0.341 1989 2.60 1.58 0.955 1.581 1993 3.01 1.63 1.102 1.630 2000 7.67 1.75 2.038 1.745 2007 4.31 1.76 1.461 1.765 2009 4.56 1.74 1.517 1.742 2015 5.28 1.83 1.664 1.826 2016 5.45 1.85 1.696 1.851 Change 1979–2007 1.09 0.36 0.29 1.42 1979–2016 2.23 0.44 0.53 1.51 1989–2016 2.86 0.27 0.74 0.27 Source: Authors’ analysis of data on top 0.1 percent wages from the EPI State of Working America Data Library, Mishel and Wolfe 2017, and extrapolation of Kaplan’s (2012b) CEO compensation series Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

 For comparison purposes, Table 2 also shows the changes in the gross (not regression-adjusted) college-to-high-school wage premium. This premium, which is simply how much more pay is earned by workers with a college degree relative to workers with just a high school degree is useful because some commentators, such as Mankiw (2013), assert that the wage and income growth of the top 1 percent reflects the general rise in the return to skills, as reflected in higher college wage premiums. (The comparisons end in 2016 because 2017 data for top 0.1 percent wages are not yet available).

 In 2016 CEO pay was 5.45 times the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, up from 2015 (despite the decline in compensation in 2016) and substantially higher than the 4.31 ratio in 2007. Since 2007 CEO compensation has thus grown far more rapidly than did the wages of the top 0.1 percent of earners. CEO compensation relative to the wages of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners in 2016 far exceeded the ratio of 2.60 in 1989, a rise (2.86) equal to the pay of almost three very-high-wage earners (a one-point rise in the ratio is the equivalent of the average CEO earning an additional amount equal to that of the average earnings of someone in the top 0.1 percent). The log ratio of CEO relative pay grew 74 log points with respect to wage earners in the top 0.1 percent.

 Is this increase large? Kaplan (2012a, 4) concludes that CEO relative pay “has remained relatively constant or declined.” He finds that the ratio “remains above its historical average and the level in the mid-1980s” (2012b, 14). His historical comparisons are inaccurate, however. Figure D compares the ratios of the compensation of CEOs and top 0.1 percent of wage earner ratios back to 1947. In 2016 this ratio was 5.45, 2.27 points higher than the historical average of 3.18 (a relative gain in wages earned by the equivalent of 2.27 high-wage earners).

 Figure D Comparison of CEO compensation with top 0.1 percent wages, 1947–2016 Year Ratio of CEO pay to top 0.1% wages 1947–1979 average ratio: 3.18 1947 3.50 3.18 1948 3.10 3.18 1949 3.50 3.18 1950 2.98 3.18 1951 2.98 3.18 1952 2.91 3.18 1953 3.25 3.18 1954 3.37 3.18 1955 3.39 3.18 1956 3.36 3.18 1957 3.74 3.18 1958 3.74 3.18 1959 4.18 3.18 1960 3.22 3.18 1961 3.49 3.18 1962 3.50 3.18 1963 3.61 3.18 1964 3.37 3.18 1965 3.28 3.18 1966 3.10 3.18 1967 3.05 3.18 1968 2.99 3.18 1969 3.06 3.18 1970 2.97 3.18 1971 2.81 3.18 1972 2.89 3.18 1973 2.69 3.18 1974 2.66 3.18 1975 2.26 3.18 1976 2.30 3.18 1977 2.40 3.18 1978 2.78 3.18 1979 3.22 3.18 1980 2.72 3.18 1981 2.94 3.18 1982 2.76 3.18 1983 2.76 3.18 1984 2.54 3.18 1985 3.08 3.18 1986 2.89 3.18 1987 2.59 3.18 1988 2.35 3.18 1989 2.60 3.18 1990 2.72 3.18 1991 3.08 3.18 1992 2.81 3.18 1993 3.01 3.18 1994 3.94 3.18 1995 4.06 3.18 1996 5.43 3.18 1997 5.22 3.18 1998 5.84 3.18 1999 5.96 3.18 2000 7.67 3.18 2001 6.80 3.18 2002 6.02 3.18 2003 5.34 3.18 2004 5.21 3.18 2005 4.94 3.18 2006 5.12 3.18 2007 4.31 3.18 2008 4.50 3.18 2009 4.56 3.18 2010 4.79 3.18 2011 4.89 3.18 2012 5.03 3.18 2013 5.71 3.18 2014 5.55 3.18 2015 5.28 3.18 2016 5.45 3.18 ChartData Download data The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel. The data underlying the figure. Source: Authors’ analysis of data on top 0.1 percent wages from Mishel and Wolfe 2017 and extrapolation of Kaplan’s (2012b) CEO compensation series Share on Facebook Tweet this chart Embed Copy the code below to embed this chart on your website. Download image

 The data in Table 2 also provide a benchmark of CEO compensation to that of the college-to-high-school wage premium. Since 1979, and particularly since 1989, the increase in the logged CEO pay premium relative to other high-wage earners far exceeded the rise in the college-to-high-school wage premium, which is widely and appropriately considered to have had substantial growth. Mankiw’s claim that top 1 percent pay or top executive pay simply corresponds to the rise in the college-to-high-school wage premium is unfounded (Mishel 2013a, 2013b). Moreover, the data would show even faster growth of CEO relative pay if Kaplan had built his historical series using the Frydman and Saks (2010) series for the 1980–1994 period rather than the Hall and Liebman (1997) data.

 If CEO pay growing far faster than that of other high earners is a test of the presence of rents, as Kaplan suggests, one would conclude that today’s top executives are collecting substantial rents, meaning that if they were paid less there would be no loss of productivity or output. The large discrepancy between the pay of CEOs and other very-high-wage earners also casts doubt on the claim that CEOs are being paid these extraordinary amounts because of their special skills and the market for those skills. It is unlikely that the skills of CEOs of very large firms are so outsized and disconnected from the skills of others that they propel CEOs past most of their cohorts in the top 1/10th of the top 1 percent. For everyone else, the distribution of skills, as reflected in the overall wage distribution, tends to be much more continuous.

 Conclusion

 Some observers argue that exorbitant CEO compensation is merely a symbolic issue, with no consequences for the vast majority of workers. However, the escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1 percent incomes. In their study of tax returns from 1979 to 2005, Bakija, Cole, and Heim (2010) establish that the increases in income among the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were disproportionately driven by households headed by someone who was either a nonfinancial-sector “executive” (including managers and supervisors, hereafter referred to as “nonfinance executives”) or a financial-sector worker (executive or otherwise). Forty-four percent of the growth of the top 0.1 percent’s income share and 36 percent of the top 1 percent’s income share accrued to households headed by a nonfinance executive; another 23 percent for each group accrued to financial-sector households. Together, finance workers and nonfinance executives accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent of households and 67 percent of the income growth of the top 0.1 percent. Relative to others in the top 1 percent, households headed by nonfinance executives had roughly average income growth, those headed by someone in the financial sector had above-average income growth, and the remaining households (nonexecutive, nonfinance) had slower-than-average income growth. These shares may actually understate the role of nonfinance executives and the financial sector, because they do not account for increased spousal income from these sources.

 High CEO pay reflects economic rents—concessions CEOs can draw from the economy not by virtue of their contribution to economic output but by virtue of their position. Clifford (2017) describes the Lake Wobegon world of setting CEO compensation that fuels its growth: Every firm wants to believe its CEO is above average and therefore needs to be correspondingly remunerated. CEO pay could be reduced and the economy would not suffer any loss of output.

 Another implication of rising CEO pay is that it reflects income that otherwise would have accrued to others: What the executives earned was not available for broader-based wage growth for other workers. (Bivens and Mishel 2013 explore this issue in depth.)

 Average CEO compensation (based on stock options realized) spiked upward by 17.6 percent in 2017. The spurt in CEO compensation reflects the underlying growth in the stock-related components of compensation, both stock awards and stock options realized. Compensation of the bottom 80 percent grew just 0.2 percent in 2017, continuing the trend of sluggish compensation growth for the vast majority. CEO compensation is historically high, although it remains below the levels attained in 2000 and 2007.

 Several policy options could reverse the trend of excessive executive pay and broaden wage growth. Some involve taxes. Implementing higher marginal income tax rates at the very top would limit rent-seeking behavior and reduce the incentives for executives to push for such high pay. Another option is to set corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation. Clifford (2017) recommends setting a cap on compensation and taxing anything over the cap, similar to the way baseball team payrolls are taxed when they exceed a cap. Other policies that could potentially limit executive pay growth are changes in corporate governance, such as greater use of “say on pay,” which allows a firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.

 Acknowledgments

 The authors thank the Stephen Silberstein Foundation for its generous support of this research. Steven Balsam, an accounting professor at Temple University and author of a book on executive compensation (Balsam 2013), provided useful advice on data construction and interpretation.

 About the authors

 Lawrence Mishel is a distinguished fellow and former president of the Economic Policy Institute. He is the co-author of all 12 editions of The State of Working America. His articles have appeared in a variety of academic and nonacademic journals. His areas of research include labor economics, wage and income distribution, industrial relations, productivity growth, and the economics of education. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

 Jessica Schieder is an economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute and the Economic Analysis and Research Network. Her areas of research include wage trends, executive compensation, gender and racial wage gaps, and social protection. She holds a master’s degree in international development from Georgetown University.

 Endnotes

 There were 38,824 executives in publicly held firms and 9,692 people in the top 0.1 percent of wage earners in 2007, according to the Capital IQ database (tabulations provided by Temple University professor Steve Balsam).

 We chose which years to present in the table in part based on data availability. Where possible, we chose cyclical peaks (years of low unemployment).

 In previous reports, the sample in a year had fewer than 350 firms, because there were no data for large firms that did not have the same CEO for most of or all of the year or the compensation data were not reported. The samples now include the largest firms (by revenue), which report executive compensation. We revised the data back to 1992 accordingly, using ExecuComp data from Compustat. Establishing these criteria for inclusion in the sample prevents potentially volatile shifts in the composition of firms in the sample because of missing data from influencing the level and trends in compensation. By establishing 350 firms in the sample, we are forcing some smaller firms with lower executive compensation into it, thereby lowering the average compensation and the average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio.

 Most Fortune 500 companies release annual financial data in early spring; the data are included in samples limited to the first half of the year. However, the date we present for previous years includes all of the data that were released during each calendar year. This creates a bias in comparing data for the first half of the year relative to the full year’s data in the prior or earlier years: compensation levels for the full year’s data are higher than compensation in the data limited to the first half. A comparison of data available in June thus shows a smaller increase when compared with the previous year’s full data than a comparison with the data that were available at the same time a year earlier. We analyzed the impact of this bias and found that the vast majority of top firms remain unchanged between the samples for the first half and the full year. However, there is churn among the smaller firms in the sample. Among firms with lower net annual sales, average CEO compensation tends to be higher in the full-year sample. Additionally, in recent years firms reporting later in the year have tended to be firms with lower worker compensation levels and therefore higher CEO-to-worker compensation ratios.

 There are a limited number of firms, which existed only for certain years between 1992 and 1996, for which a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) value is unassigned. This makes it not possible to identify the pay of the workers in the firm’s key industry. In these cases these firms are not included in the calculation of the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio.

 We thank Steve Kaplan for sharing his CEO compensation series with us. The series on the income of the top 0.1 percent of households that Kaplan used is no longer available. Moreover, as we discuss, the appropriate comparison is to other earners, not to households, which could have multiple earners and shifts in the number of earners over time.

 Temple University professor Steve Balsam provided tabulations from the Capital IQ database of annual wages of executives exceeding the wage thresholds (provided to him) that place them in the top 0.1 percent of wage earners. The 9,692 executives in publicly held firms who were in the top 0.1 percent of wage earners had average annual earnings of $4.4 million. Using Mishel et al.’s (2012) estimates of top 0.1 percent wages, we find that executive wages make up 13.3 percent of total top 0.1 percent wages. One can gauge the bias of including executive wages in the denominator by noting that the ratio of executive wages to all top 0.1 percent wages in 2007 was 2.14 but the ratio of executive wages to nonexecutive wages was 2.32. We do not have data that would permit an assessment of the bias in 1979 or 1989. We also lack information on the number and wages of executives in privately held firms; to the extent that their CEO compensation exceeds that of publicly traded firms, their inclusion would indicate an even larger bias. The Internal Revenue Service reports that there were nearly 15,000 corporate tax returns in 2007 of firms with assets exceeding $250 million, indicating that there are many more executives of large firms than just those in publicly held firms.

 Kaplan (2012b, 14) notes that the Frydman and Saks series grew 289 percent whereas the Hall and Liebman series grew 209 percent. He also notes that the Frydman and Saks series grows faster than the series reported by Murphy (2012).

 The discussion in this paragraph is taken from Bivens and Mishel 2013.

 References

 Bakija, Jon, Adam Cole, and Bradley Heim. 2010. “Job and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data.” Department of Economics Working Paper 2010-24, Williams College, November 2010.

 Bakija, Jon, Adam Cole, and Bradley Heim. 2012. “Job and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data.” Department of Economics Working Paper, Williams College, February 2012.

 Balsam, Steven. 2013. Equity Compensation: Motivations and Implications. Washington, D.C.: WorldatWork Press.

 Bebchuk, Lucian, and Jesse Fried. 2004. Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Remuneration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

 Bivens, Josh, Elise Gould, Lawrence Mishel, and Heidi Shierholz. 2014. Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper no. 378, June 2014.

 Bivens, Josh, and Lawrence Mishel. 2013. “The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes.” Economic Policy Institute Working Paper no. 296, June 2013.

 Bureau of Economic Analysis. Various years. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) Tables [online data tables]. Tables 6.2C, 6.2D, 6.3C, and 6.3D.

 Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2015. “Occupational Employment and Wages—May 2014” [news release].

 Bureau of Labor Statistics. Various years. Employment, Hours, and Earnings—National [database]. In Current Employment Statistics [public data series].

 Clifford, Steven. 2017. The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It. New York: Penguin Random House.

 Compustat. Various years. ExecuComp [commercial database].

 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Various years. Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) [database].

 Frydman, Carola, and Raven E. Saks. 2010. “Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936–2005.” Review of Financial Studies 23: 2099–2138.

 Gould, Elise. 2018. The State of American Wages 2017: Wages Have Finally Recovered from the Blow of the Great Recession but Are Still Growing Too Slowly and Unequally. Economic Policy Institute, March 2018.

 Hall, Brian J., and Jeffrey B. Liebman. 1997. “Are CEOs Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 6213, October 1997.

 Kaplan, Steven N. 2012a. “Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in the U.S.: Perceptions, Facts, and Challenges.” Martin Feldstein Lecture. National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, D.C., July 10, 2012.

 Kaplan, Steven N. 2012b. “Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in the U.S.: Perceptions, Facts, and Challenges.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 18395, September 2012.

 Kopczuk, Wojciech, Emmanuel Saez, and Jae Song. 2010. “Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data since 1937.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1: 91–128.

 Mankiw, N. Gregory. 2013. “Defending the One Percent.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27, no. 3: 21–24.

 Mishel, Lawrence. 2013a. “Greg Mankiw Forgets to Offer Data for His Biggest Claim.” Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), June 25, 2013.

 Mishel, Lawrence. 2013b. “Working as Designed: High Profits and Stagnant Wages.” Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), March 28, 2013.

 Mishel, Lawrence, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Heidi Shierholz. 2012. The State of Working America, 12th Edition. An Economic Policy Institute book. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.

 Mishel, Lawrence, and Jessica Schieder. 2016. Stock Market Headwinds Meant Less Generous Year for Some CEOs. Economic Policy Institute, July 2016.

 Mishel, Lawrence, and Jessica Schieder. 2017. CEO Pay Remains High Relative to the Pay of Typical Workers and High-Wage Earners. Economic Policy Institute, July 20, 2017.

 Mishel, Lawrence, and Julia Wolfe. 2017. “Wages Rose for the Bottom 90 Percent in 2016 as Those for Top 1 Percent Fell.” Working Economics (Economic Policy Institute blog), October 31, 2017.

 Murphy, Kevin. 2012. “The Politics of Pay: A Legislative History of Executive Compensation.” University of Southern California Marshall School of Business Working Paper no. FBE 01.11.

 Sabadish, Natalie, and Lawrence Mishel. 2013. “Methodology for Measuring CEO Compensation and the Ratio of CEO-to-Worker Compensation: 2012 Data Update.” Economic Policy Institute Working Paper no. 298, June 2013.

 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 2015. “SEC Adopts Rule for Pay Ratio Disclosure: Rule Implements Dodd-Frank Mandate While Providing Companies with Flexibility to Calculate Pay Ratio” (press release no. 2015-160), August 5, 2015.

 Staff of Congressman Keith Ellison. 2018. Rewarding or Hoarding? An Examination of Pay Ratios Revealed by Dodd-Frank. May 2018. |||||
A summary of this is?

– For every dollar made by the average Facebook employee, Mark Zuckerberg earned $37 in 2017. As far as CEO pay goes, that's nothing. The CEOs of America's top 350 publicly held companies earned an average of $18.9 million in wages, bonuses, and stock options last year, or 312 times more than their workers, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Per the Guardian, such an "astronomical gap" hasn't been seen since the eve of the 2007 financial crisis. The 17.6% increase in average CEO pay, compared to 0.3% for workers, had a lot to do with a booming stock market, but it's also part of a larger trend. Since 2009, average CEO pay has risen 72%, compared to about 2% for workers, who now make $54,600 on average. "It speaks to the degree the economic recovery is unbalanced," report co-author Larry Mishel tells the Washington Post, which describes CEO-to-worker pay ratios of 3,101-to-1 for McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook and 1,188-to-1 for Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. "Had there not been the redistribution upward … the wages of the bottom 90% could have grown twice as fast as it actually did," Mishel tells the Guardian. Per the Post, 2018 figures could be even worse for workers given the tax package signed into law last fall; critics say it will make the rich richer, though Republican backers claim it will increase wages across the board.


Article:
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images

 An interesting thing happened in my neighborhood recently. A small posse of local busybodies organized as the Shaw Dupont Citizens Alliance proposed a moratorium on new liquor licenses for the increasingly vibrant nightlife corridors on 14th Street and U Street in Washington, D.C. Similar moratoria already constrain longer-established D.C. drinking hubs, and when I heard about the Shaw Dupont proposal, initially I felt despondent. But, in fact, the NIMBYs look set to lose. A guy named Michael Hamilton founded a counter-group called In My Backyard—D.C. to argue for growth-friendly policies. At a neighborhood listening session, moratorium proponents were vastly outnumbered. For now it looks as if Logan Circle and U Street will continue to be safe for entrepreneurs who want to turn vacant storefronts and derelict structures into bars and restaurants.

 Similar fights play out in cities all around the country but not always with the same happy outcome. Almost invariably, these fights give the extreme deference to the concerns of immediate neighbors. But this deference has a cost for everyone else. Cities need to recognize that bars and restaurants are not the ugly stepchildren of the modern urban economy: They are its greatest strength. They spur small-business growth and creation citywide. When cities consider whether to allow them, they should think about the overall benefits to the region, not the particular complaints of near neighbors.

 My neighborhood is hardly the only nightlife cluster in urban America featuring a version of this controversy. Last fall a group of residents of the Lower East Side in New York—some oddly appropriating the “Occupy” brand—tried to bring a halt to the issuance of new liquor licenses. Chicago has areas that have voted to become completely “dry” and moratorium zones where existing businesses stay open but no new liquor licenses can be issued. In California, many whole counties—including all of San Francisco—have gone into moratorium status.

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 Proponents of curtailing licenses typically cite local nuisance effects as the key reason. One of the Lower East Side anti-booze crusaders was quoted as worrying about a “Wild West atmosphere.” In Washington, agitators cite the nightmare of becoming “the next Adams-Morgan”—while the actual Adams-Morgan is itself one of the areas operating under a moratorium.

 These complaints ought to be understood in the larger context of urban economics. Moratorium boosters often seem to think there’s something unnatural about the heavy concentration of booze-serving establishments in a single area. They also think restricting bars and restaurants will cause the kind of thriving local retail they remember from old Jane Jacobs books to magically appear.

 In reality, there’s nothing particularly unusual about similar firms clustering together. Auto companies were all near Detroit for a long time; high-tech firms huddle in the Bay Area; And nightlife hubs arise for similar reasons. Drinking and dining establishments want to be where people are likely to look for them. And people want to go to places where they’ll find options. Complicated interdependencies and complementarities can arise. The late-night pizza joint’s proximity to the dive bar increases the value of both. Alternatively, you might want to meet friends for dinner in a neighborhood where you’re also likely to be able to grab a drink afterwards. Theaters and live-music venues benefit from proximity to other after-hours activities and also drive customers to bars and restaurants. Forcing the cluster to disperse destroys its value. Preventing new firms from entering the cluster fosters high prices and mediocrity, as underperforming bars and restaurants can essentially free-ride on the rest of the cluster.

 Providing these kinds of dense networks of related but independent small undertakings is exactly what cities are good at.

 What they’re not so good at is playing host to modern retailers. Traditional urban neighborhoods feature old buildings with small, often irregularly shaped spaces that are ill-suited to the needs of contemporary retail chains. Refusing to grant liquor licenses won't undo the decades of history that brought us big-box stores.* It just leads to empty storefronts and car rides out to Ikea or Costco. The good news for cities is that lately Amazon has been crushing the big-box sector, and e-commerce levels the shopping playing field between traditional urban neighborhoods and suburban ones. And those smallish and idiosyncratic structures are ideal spaces for bars and restaurants—much better than personality-free malls. Even better is that the Internet isn’t going to put restaurants out of business, for obvious reasons.

 Under the circumstances, promoting the development and expansion of nightlife hubs should be a key economic development priority for cities. Or, rather, preventing neighborhood busybodies from stifling them ought to be. That means making decisions about liquor-licensing rules at a higher level, with consideration of the full citywide effects in terms of tax revenue and job creation. And it means attempting to directly address perceived problems with crime and trash. Instead of refusing to issue new liquor licenses, why not send more cops and offer more frequent street cleaning in the hubs? Food service isn’t the sexiest sector in the economy. But it’s one that every city can be strong in. It also provides great opportunities for locally owned businesses, and meaningful opportunities for people with limited formal education to work their way up the ladder and go into business for themselves. Cities need to treat it as a more serious matter than a simple question of neighborhood opinion. ||||| Drinking too much can harm your health. Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years.1,2 Further, excessive drinking was responsible for 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years. The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2010 were estimated at $249 billion, or $2.05 a drink.3 Download a PDF of this factsheet in English Cdc-pdf [PDF – 0.9MB] or in Spanish Cdc-pdf [PDF – 1.1MB]

 What is a “drink”?

 In the United States, a standard drink contains 0.6 ounces (14.0 grams or 1.2 tablespoons) of pure alcohol. Generally, this amount of pure alcohol is found in

 12-ounces of beer (5% alcohol content).

 8-ounces of malt liquor (7% alcohol content).

 5-ounces of wine (12% alcohol content).

 1.5-ounces of 80-proof (40% alcohol content) distilled spirits or liquor (e.g., gin, rum, vodka, whiskey).4

 What is excessive drinking?

 Excessive drinking includes binge drinking, heavy drinking, and any drinking by pregnant women or people younger than age 21.

 Binge drinking, the most common form of excessive drinking, is defined as consuming For women, 4 or more drinks during a single occasion. For men, 5 or more drinks during a single occasion.

 Heavy drinking is defined as consuming For women, 8 or more drinks per week. For men, 15 or more drinks per week.

 Most people who drink excessively are not alcoholics or alcohol dependent.5

 What is moderate drinking?

 The Dietary Guidelines for Americans defines moderate drinking as up to 1 drink per day for women and up to 2 drinks per day for men.4 In addition, the Dietary Guidelines do not recommend that individuals who do not drink alcohol start drinking for any reason.

 However, there are some people who should not drink any alcohol, including those who are:

 Younger than age 21.

 Pregnant or may be pregnant.

 Driving, planning to drive, or participating in other activities requiring skill, coordination, and alertness.

 Taking certain prescription or over-the-counter medications that can interact with alcohol.

 Suffering from certain medical conditions.

 Recovering from alcoholism or are unable to control the amount they drink.

 By adhering to the Dietary Guidelines, you can reduce the risk of harm to yourself or others.

 Short-Term Health Risks

 Excessive alcohol use has immediate effects that increase the risk of many harmful health conditions. These are most often the result of binge drinking and include the following:

 Injuries, such as motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings, and burns. 6,7

 Violence, including homicide, suicide, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. 6-10

 Alcohol poisoning, a medical emergency that results from high blood alcohol levels. 11

 Risky sexual behaviors, including unprotected sex or sex with multiple partners. These behaviors can result in unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. 12,13

 Miscarriage and stillbirth or fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) among pregnant women.6,12,14,15

 Long-Term Health Risks

 Over time, excessive alcohol use can lead to the development of chronic diseases and other serious problems including:

 High blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, liver disease, and digestive problems. 6,16

 Cancer of the breast, mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, and colon. 6,17

 Learning and memory problems, including dementia and poor school performance. 6,18

 Mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. 6,19

 Social problems, including lost productivity, family problems, and unemployment. 6,20,21

 Alcohol dependence, or alcoholism.5

 By not drinking too much, you can reduce the risk of these short- and long-term health risks.

 References ||||| AIMS:

 Substituting cannabis for alcohol may reduce drinking and related problems among alcohol-dependent individuals. Some even recommend prescribing medical cannabis to individuals attempting to reduce drinking. The primary aim of this review is to assess whether cannabis satisfies the seven previously published criteria for substitute medications for alcohol [e.g. 'reduces alcohol-related harms'; 'is safer in overdose than alcohol'; 'should offer significant health economic benefits'; see Chick and Nutt ((2012) Substitution therapy for alcoholism: time for a reappraisal? J Psychopharmacol 26:205-12)].

 METHODS:

 Literature review.

 RESULTS:

 All criteria appear either satisfied or partially satisfied, though studies relying on medical cannabis patients may be limited by selection bias and/or retrospective designs. Individual-level factors, such as severity of alcohol problems, may also moderate substitution.

 CONCLUSIONS:

 There is no clear pattern of outcomes related to cannabis substitution. Most importantly, the recommendation to prescribe alcohol-dependent individuals cannabis to help reduce drinking is premature. Future studies should use longitudinal data to better understand the consequences of cannabis substitution. ||||| Blogger-pundit Matt Yglesias really wants more bars. First at Think Progress, then at Slate and now at Vox, the commentator has waged a one-man rhetorical war on the country’s urban liquor boards. The current licensing system, in which the number of bars is constrained by city bureaucrats rather than market demand, Yglesias has argued, leaves us with a paucity of public drinking spots where they’re wanted. From New York’s East Village to Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C., license limitations have caused bars to become rare, expensive, crowded and all around worse.

 There’s just one problem with Yglesias’ more-bars plan: alcohol. America has a serious issue with responsible drinking, and increasing the number of sales locations probably won’t help. Alcohol abuse already kills tens of thousands of Americans annually and costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, health care and property damage. It’s an especially big problem for college students and other young people; Jake New reported for Insider Higher Education that at least eight college freshman died in the first few weeks of school this year, most in alcohol-related accidents or overdoses. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a fairly dramatic increase of alcohol-related hospitalizations in this age group,” George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, told New. More bars would contribute to what’s already a public health crisis. Studies in Los Angeles and Cleveland suggest adding a bar is associated with about three additional violent crimes a year.

 It’s hard to imagine bars without alcohol. Caffeine is popular, but it’s not what economists call a substitute good for booze. Luckily, those aren’t our only options. In a post for Vox, German Lopez suggested that the strongest argument for marijuana legalization might be that people will use it instead of alcohol. Although prohibition has no doubt suppressed use, marijuana’s social costs per user are negligible, especially compared with alcohol’s. A recent National Institutes of Health study suggested that marijuana appears to fit the seven published criteria to be a substitute medication for alcohol, in the same way doctors prescribe methadone for heroin dependence. From a public health perspective, every drink we can replace with a toke is a victory.

 Individual states, moved by a combination of hard evidence and shifting public opinion, are advancing with plans to legalize recreational marijuana use. So far, only Colorado and Washington have gone all the way to legalization, but the whole country is headed quickly in that direction. Despite all the new regulatory architectures for growing, distributing and using marijuana without violating the law, no states have been willing to propose what responsible common use in public could look like. Not one Amsterdam-style coffee shop has managed to keep its doors open. Still, there’s a demand for marijuana bars or weed cafes or whatever we end up calling them, a demand that’s being suppressed far more strongly than the demand for more alcohol bars. ||||| BACKGROUND:

 Excessive alcohol consumption causes premature death (average of 79,000 deaths annually); increased disease and injury; property damage from fire and motor vehicle crashes; alcohol-related crime; and lost productivity. However, its economic cost has not been assessed for the U.S. since 1998.

 PURPOSE:

 To update prior national estimates of the economic costs of excessive drinking.

 METHODS:

 This study (conducted 2009-2010) followed U.S. Public Health Service Guidelines to assess the economic cost of excessive alcohol consumption in 2006. Costs for health care, productivity losses, and other effects (e.g., property damage) in 2006 were obtained from national databases. Alcohol-attributable fractions were obtained from multiple sources and used to assess the proportion of costs that could be attributed to excessive alcohol consumption.

 RESULTS:

 The estimated economic cost of excessive drinking was $223.5 billion in 2006 (72.2% from lost productivity, 11.0% from healthcare costs, 9.4% from criminal justice costs, and 7.5% from other effects) or approximately $1.90 per alcoholic drink. Binge drinking resulted in costs of $170.7 billion (76.4% of the total); underage drinking $24.6 [corrected] billion; and drinking during pregnancy $5.2 billion. The cost of alcohol-attributable crime was $73.3 billion. The cost to government was $94.2 billion (42.1% of the total cost), which corresponds to about $0.80 per alcoholic drink consumed in 2006 (categories are not mutually exclusive and may overlap).

 CONCLUSIONS:

 On a per capita basis, the economic impact of excessive alcohol consumption in the U.S. is approximately $746 per person, most of which is attributable to binge drinking. Evidence-based strategies for reducing excessive drinking should be widely implemented.

 Copyright © 2011 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. All rights reserved. |||||Summary:

– Malcolm Harris doesn't have a problem with more bars—he just thinks those bars should sell pot, not alcohol. In an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera America, Harris offers his take on how marijuana bars would give Americans more palatable gathering spaces with fewer health risks, creating an "urban-planning win-win" and possibly even saving lives. Some highlights: Harris points out the 88,000 deaths annually from excessive alcohol use as noted by the CDC and the "hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, health care, and property damage" that the National Institutes of Health has researched. Citing another NIH study, Harris says that pot would serve as an acceptable "substitute medication" for booze: "From a public health perspective, every drink we can replace with a toke is a victory." There are few places these days that resemble the famous bar from Cheers. "Fewer and fewer people have a third place (not work or home) where everyone knows their name," Harris writes. Because so many people have migrated to the suburbs and holed up with their cable TV and Internet, not as many people are heading out to congregate. "These spaces [would] promote community integration, friendship, and extrafamilial networks of support," Harris notes. Although he's optimistic that "eventually Americans will have public places to go and get high with their friends," Harris thinks government should ease up on strict regulations. "Not one Amsterdam-style coffee shop has managed to keep its doors open," he writes. "Though owners seem willing to conform to whatever guidelines they're given, so far, no locality wants to be the first to host an American marijuana bar." Harris also acknowledges some of the logistical hurdles that businesses may have to overcome. "One problem with weed bars is employees' right to a smoke-free workplace; even if cops allowed indoor marijuana smoking, no one would be allowed to work there," he writes. Click for his full piece.


Summarize this article:

Twin blasts targeting Syria's army command headquarters rocked the capital on Wednesday, setting off hours of sporadic gunbattles and a raging fire inside the heavily guarded compound, state-run media and witnesses said.

 In this image taken from video obtained from the Syria 2011 Archives, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, black smoke rises from Syria's army command headquarters... (Associated Press)

 A Free Syrian Army fighter fires at Syrian Army positions during clashes in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012. Over the past few months, rebels have increasingly targeted security sites and symbols... (Associated Press)

 A woman cries while holding the body of her brother, who was killed by Syrian Army, in front of Dar El Shifa hospital in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012. Over the past few months, rebels have increasingly... (Associated Press)

 This photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows Syrian government forces speaking with Syrian women as they patrol the damaged area of the al-Arqoub district in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday,... (Associated Press)

 A Syrian woman cries near Dar El Shifa hospital while the body of her brother, killed by Syrian Army, lies on the street in Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012. Over the past few months, rebels have... (Associated Press)

 An army statement said no military commanders or personnel were hurt in the explosions, one of which was from a car bomb. But Iranian Press TV said one of its correspondents, 33-year-old Maya Nasser, a Syrian national, died in an exchange of fire in the area following the blasts.

 The explosions were the latest to hit the Syrian capital as the country's civil war intensified and appeared to show the deep reach of the rebels determined to topple President Bashar Assad's regime.

 Syria's state-run news agency, SANA, said the explosions struck just before 7 a.m. (0400 GMT) near the landmark Omayyad Square. They were heard several miles (kilometers) away and shattered the windows of the Dama Rose hotel and other nearby buildings.

 The army command building was in flames, sending huge columns of thick black smoke that hung over Damascus for several hours following the blasts.

 Witnesses said the explosions were followed by heavy gunfire that stretched on for hours at the Omayyad Square and around the military compound. One witness who managed to get close to the area, which was cordoned off, saw panicked soldiers shooting in the air randomly as they ran.

 The witness, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said it appears that rebels may have been holed up inside the army command building, from where the sound of gunfire could clearly be heard.

 The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, said heavy clashes were taking place inside the compound of the army command, adding that there were casualties on both sides.

 "The explosions shook the entire apartment and the windows shattered," said a resident of the nearby Abu Rummaneh district who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. "It was like a quake."

 The army statement said the blasts were caused by a car bomb and an explosive device that went off near the army command buildings. It said "terrorists" in the area simultaneously opened fire randomly to terrorize people, adding that authorities were pursuing the gunmen. Syrian authorities regularly refer to rebels fighting to topple Assad's regime as terrorists.

 The statement said a number of guards were wounded.

 "I can confirm that all our comrades in the military command and defense ministry are fine," Information Minister Omran Zoubi told Syrian TV, which is located near the site of the explosion, in a telephone call.

 "Everything is normal," he said. "There was a terrorist act, perhaps near a significant location, yes, this is true, but they failed as usual to achieve their goals."

 Ambulances were rushed to the site as police sealed off the area to traffic and journalists. Traffic in other areas snarled as checkpoints were set up, blocking access to the capital from the suburbs.

 Syria's unrest began in March 2011 when protests calling for political change met a violent government crackdown. Many in the opposition have since taken up arms as the conflict morphed into a civil war that activists say has killed nearly 30,000 people. Over the past few months, the rebels have increasingly targeted security sites and symbols of regime power in a bid to turn the tide in the fighting.

 On July 18, rebels penetrated the heart of Syria's power elite, detonating a bomb inside a high-level crisis meeting in Damascus that killed three top regime officials, including Assad's brother-in-law and the defense minister. Other large blasts have targeted the headquarters of security agencies in the capital, killing scores of people this year.

 On Tuesday, several bombs went off inside a Damascus school that activists said was being used by regime forces as a security headquarters. Several people were wounded.

 Syria's conflict was the focus of attention as world leaders gathered at the U.N. General Assembly's annual meeting in New York this week.

 U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanded international action to stop the war in Syria, telling a somber gathering of world leaders Tuesday that the 18-month conflict had become "a regional calamity with global ramifications."

 Ban, declaring that the situation in Syria is getting worse every day, called the conflict a serious and growing threat to international peace and security that requires attention from the deeply divided U.N. Security Council.

 That appears highly unlikely, however, at least in the near future.

 Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed resolutions aimed at pressuring Assad to end the violence and enter negotiations on a political transition, leaving the U.N.'s most powerful body paralyzed in what some diplomats say is the worst crisis since the U.S.-Soviet standoff during the Cold War.

 In sharp contrast to the U.N. chief, President Barack Obama pledged U.S. support for Syrians trying to oust Assad _ "a dictator who massacres his own people."

 ___

 Karam reported from Beirut. ||||| Loading ...

 The two were covering twin blasts in Damascus and the ensuing fighting.

 Insurgents in the Syrian capital Damascus have attacked Press TV staff, killing the Iranian English-language news network’s correspondent Maya Naser, and injuring its Damascus Bureau Chief Hosein Mortada. Naser came under attack while reporting on air just hours ago. He was shot and killed by a sniper. Press TV and Al-Alam Damascus Bureau Chief Hosein Mortada also came under attack and was injured.“We hold Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who provide militants weapons to kill civilians, military personnel and journalists, responsible for killing Maya,” Press TV’s News Room Director Hamid Reza Emadi said. “Press TV will pursue the matter of the murder of Maya and would not let those who killed the correspondent feel like they can kill the media people and get away with it,” he emphasized. Born on July 30, 1979 in Syria, Maya Naser studied political science at KUPLAN University, NY, US. He was fluent in Arabic and English and had worked in many countries including the USA, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Bahrain. AO/HJL/IS |||||

– Damascus has been rocked by bombings for the past two days, with at least two large blasts hitting Syria's military headquarters there this morning. The Free Syrian Army claimed responsibility for the attack, said to be the largest since July explosions killed President Bashar al-Assad's brother-in-law and other key aides; the BBC reports that Assad would have been able to hear today's explosions from his palace. Gunfire broke out afterward, and Maya Nasser, a TV correspondent for the Iranian Press TV, was shot dead by sniper fire during a live broadcast, report the New York Times and Press TV. Other government facilities were hit by bombs yesterday, proving the opposition can still get past government security, but the regime is downplaying the scope of the attacks while the opposition says many of Assad's forces have been killed. In other news from Syria: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for international action at the General Assembly yesterday, calling the conflict "a regional calamity with global ramifications," the AP reports. Click for more from the General Assembly on Syria. Clashes have also been reported near Syria's border with Israel, leading the Israel Defense Forces to issue a statement declaring that "fire from Syria leaking into Israel will not be accepted."


Article:

ALGIERS French warplanes and U.N. helicopters scoured the north of Mali on Thursday for the wreckage of an Air Algerie flight after it crashed carrying 110 passengers, nearly half of them French, from Burkina Faso to Algiers.

 French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said authorities believed flight AH5017 may have encountered bad weather after the pilot requested to change direction shortly after takeoff due to a storm. However, he said no hypothesis had been excluded.

 Officials in Mali and Burkina Faso gave conflicting accounts of locating the crash.

 Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said wreckage of the flight had been spotted in his country's far north, toward the Algerian border between the towns of Aguelhoc and Kidal.

 However, General Gilbert Diendere, a member of the crisis unit in Burkina Faso, said his team had found remains in southern Mali, 50 km (30 miles) from the Burkinabe border. Local authorities in the nearby town of Gossi also told Reuters the wreckage had been located here.

 In Paris, Fabius said the flight, carrying 51 French nationals, had probably crashed but he said two French Mirage warplanes searching the vast desert area around the northern Malian city of Gao had spotted no wreckage.

 "Despite intensive search efforts, no trace of the aircraft has yet been found," Fabius told journalists.

 An Algerian official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed the flight had crashed but provided no other details.

 French President Francois Hollande cancelled a planned visit to overseas territories and said France -- which has some 1,700 troops stationed in Mali -- would use all military means on the ground to locate the aircraft.

 "The search will take as long as needed," Hollande told reporters. "Everything must be done to find this plane. We cannot identify the causes of what happened."

 The searchers mission is complicated by the vast scale and daunting terrain of Mali. The area where the flight is suspected to have crashed is a sparsely inhabited region of scrubland and desert dunes stretching to the foothills of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.

 Much of it lies in the hands of Tuareg separatist rebels, who rose up against the government in early 2012, triggering an Islamist revolt that briefly seized control of northern Mali.

 The Malian government has only a weak presence in the region and relies on French and U.N. peacekeepers for aircraft and logistical support.

 Another plane crash is likely to add to nerves over flying after a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed over Ukraine last week, a TransAsia Airways crashed off Taiwan during a thunderstorm on Wednesday and airlines temporarily cancelled flights into Tel Aviv due to the conflict in Gaza.

 FRENCH PASSENGERS Algeria's state news agency APS said authorities lost contact with flight AH5017 an hour after it took off from Burkina Faso, but other officials gave differing accounts of the times of contact.

 Swiftair, the private Spanish company that owns the plane, confirmed it had lost contact with the MD-83 operated by Air Algerie, which it said was carrying 110 passengers and six crew.

 A spokeswoman for SEPLA, Spain's pilots union, said the six crew were from Spain. She could not give any further details.

 It said it took off from Burkina Faso at 0117 GMT and was due to land at 0510 GMT but never reached its destination.

 An Algerian aviation official said the last contact Algerian authorities had with the missing Air Algerie aircraft was at 0155 GMT when it was flying over Gao, Mali. Burkina Faso officials said the flight asked the control center in Niamey, Niger, to change route at 0138 GMT because of a storm in the Sahara.

 Burkina Faso authorities said the passenger list comprised 27 Burkinabe, 51 French, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, two from Luxembourg, five Canadians, four Germans, one Cameroonian, one Belgian, one Egyptian, one Ukranian, one Swiss, one Nigerian and one Malian.

 The Lebanese Foreign Ministry said its embassy in Abidjan estimated the number of Lebanese citizens on the flight was at least 20. Some of these may have dual nationality.

 "We don't know anything yet. We have just heard from the news that the plane went missing," said Amina Daher, whose sister-in-line Randa was traveling on the plane with her three children, returning to Beirut to celebrate the Muslim religious festival of Eid El-Fitr with her family.

 RELATIVELY CLEAN RECORD

 The MD-83 is part of the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 family of twin-engined jets that entered service in 1980. A total of 265 of the MD-83 model were delivered before McDonnell Douglas, by then part of Boeing, halted production in 1999.

 "Boeing is aware of the report. We are awaiting additional information," a spokesman for the U.S. planemaker said.

 According to the Ascend Fleets database held by British-based Flightglobal, there are 187 MD-83s still in operation, of which 80 percent are being flown in the United States.

 The aircraft's two engines are made by Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.

 Swiftair has a relatively clean safety record, with five accidents since 1977, two of which caused a total of eight deaths, according to the Washington-based Flight Safety Foundation.

 Air Algerie's last major accident was in 2003 when one of its planes crashed shortly after take-off from the southern city of Tamanrasset, killing 102 people. In February this year, 77 people died when an Algerian military transport plane crashed into a mountain in eastern Algeria.

 (Additional reporting by Patrick Markey, Daniel Flynn, David Lewis, Mathieu Bonkoungou, Emma Farge, Julien Toyer, Tracy Rucinski, Laila Bassam, Marine Pennetier, John Irish and Tim Hepher; Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Alison Williams and Sonya Hepinstall) ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. |||||
What is a summary?

– A flight operated by Air Algerie and carrying 116 people from Burkina Faso to Algeria's capital disappeared from radar early today, and an Algerian aviation official now tells Reuters the plane has crashed, though no further details were given. Air navigation services lost track of the Swiftair MD-83 about 50 minutes after takeoff from Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, at 1:55am GMT (9:55pm Eastern last night), the official Algerian news agency says. That means that Flight 5017 had been missing for hours before the news was made public. Swiftair, a private Spanish airline, confirms it has not been possible to make contact with the plane. Swiftair says the plane carrying 110 passengers and six crew left Burkina Faso for Algiers at 1:17am GMT today, but had not arrived at the scheduled time of 5:10am GMT. But, as Reuters puts it, conflicting information has been given about timing, "adding to confusion about the fate of the flight and where it might be." The plane was over Gao, Mali, when contact was lost, and a diplomat in Mali says there was a powerful sandstorm overnight in the north part of the country, over which the plane would likely have flown. The Burkina Faso transport minister says the flight asked to change course at 1:38am GMT because of a storm, according to Reuters.


– A neglected printing machine and nearly 200 blank money-order forms caught the eye of Marc Saunders sometime after he started working at the Postal Service's New Lisbon, NJ, branch in 2014. Four years later, Saunders has been hit with a five-year probation and ordered to pay the agency back almost $100,000 after he pleaded guilty to orchestrating a scheme in which he printed fraudulent money orders and gave them to others to cash, the Cherry Hill Courier-Post reports. Saunders' accomplices, who helped him find people to cash the money orders (including residents of homeless shelters), fared worse on the prison front: Anthony Bell, 39, was given a year and a day behind bars and a $22,400 restitution bill; Eugene Bowen, 36, a 20-month prison sentence and $18,500 restitution; and Andre Sutton, 39, a nine-month sentence and $4,700 restitution. An affidavit filed in Camden federal court by David Bannan, a special agent for the USPS' Office of Inspector General, details how the New Lisbon branch phased out the old money-order machine in 2013. Because it couldn't fit inside the office safe, however, the New Lisbon postmaster placed it inside a cabinet; it remained there when she moved to another branch later that year. The agent details his "evidence pointing to an inside job," noting Saunders ran his scheme between August 2015 and December 2016. Most of the money orders were cashed in the Philly area, as well as in Knoxville, Tenn. Once the stolen money orders started to emerge, Bannan traced the serial numbers to the New Lisbon office, where the machine had gone missing. Investigators then tied people who did the cashing to the suspects via their Facebook connections and cellphone info.

Expand this summary.

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 0 Down votes, mark as not useful ||||| CAMDEN, N.J. – A Knoxville, Tennessee, man was sentenced today to 20 months in prison for recruiting individuals to cash fraudulent money orders that he received from a former South Jersey U.S. Postal Service (USPS) employee, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito announced.

 Eugene Bowen, 35, previously pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez to an information charging him with one count of transmitting and presenting unlawfully issued USPS money orders with intent to defraud the United States. Judge Rodriguez imposed the sentence today in Camden federal court.

 According to the documents filed in this case and statements made in court:

 Bowen admitted that Marc Saunders, 40, of Sicklerville, New Jersey, a former employee at the USPS branch in New Lisbon, New Jersey, provided him with stolen money orders and told him to recruit others to cash them. Bowen admitted that he recruited individuals to cash the money orders and paid them a small fee, while keeping the rest of the money for Saunders and himself.

 In addition to the prison term, Judge Rodriguez sentenced Bowen to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution of $18,470.

 On Dec. 12, 2017, Saunders pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme, including producing the money orders with a stolen imprinting machine and giving them to others to cash. His sentencing is scheduled for July 24, 2018.

 Acting U.S. Attorney Carpenito credited special agents of the USPS, Office of the Inspector General, under the direction of Acting Special Agent in Charge Kenneth M. Cleevely of the Eastern Area Field Office, with the investigation leading to today’s sentencing.

 The government is represented by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alyson M. Oswald of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division in Camden.

 Defense counsel: John Brennan Esq., Marlton, New Jersey ||||| Three accomplices have received prison terms in connection with a scheme to cash money orders stolen from the U.S. Postal Service. (Photo: Jim Walsh/Staff photographer)

 CAMDEN – A former postal worker escaped prison for orchestrating a scheme to cash stolen money orders, but his middlemen weren’t so fortunate.

 A federal judge has sentenced the last of three accomplices to prison, ordering Anthony Bell, 39, of Philadelphia to spend a year and a day in custody for his role in the 15-month scheme.

 That followed prison terms of 20 months for Eugene Bowen, 36, of Knoxville, Tennessee, and nine months for Andre Sutton, 39, whose address was not available.

 More: Ex-postal worker admits he burned 20 tubs of mail

 In contrast, the scheme’s organizer, 40-year-old Marc Saunders of Sicklerville, received a five-year probationary sentence last month, including eight months of home confinement.

 Saunders was ordered to pay restitution of almost $100,000.

 The middlemen also were ordered to make restitution — about $22,400 for Bell, $18,500 for Bowen and $4,700 for Sutton.

 Postmaster left printer unguarded

 Three men have received prison terms in connection with the theft of U.S. Postal Service money orders. (Photo: Jim Walsh/Staff photographer)

 A 13-page affidavit filed in federal court in Camden says a postmaster’s errors set the stage for thefts that eventually reached some $100,000.

 It says the manager of the New Lisbon post office in rural Pemberton Township failed to return a machine that printed money orders when the Postal Service introduced new technology in February 2013.

 The postmaster, who was transferred to another office in June 2013, also neglected to destroy about 180 loose money orders that could be printed with the outdated machine, the affidavit says.

 Saunders began working more than a year later at the Pemberton office, where the printing machine — too big for the postmaster’s safe — had been stored in a cabinet, according to the affidavit by David Bannon, a special agent with the Office of Inspector General at the Postal Service.

 More: Florida man accused of altering $1 money orders, depositing them for more than $2K

 The Postal Service began investigating in late 2015, after people started cashing stolen money orders at post offices in the Philadelphia area, the affidavit says.

 Bannon said serial numbers on the money orders led him to the Pemberton Township office on rural Four Mile Road, where he learned the imprinting machine had vanished.

 According to the affidavit, Bannon then realized the stolen money orders carried ZIP codes — imprinted by the stolen machine — for post offices “all over the United States.”

 None, however, were marked with New Lisbon’s ZIP code.

 As a result, Bannon suspected a postal employee had stolen the machine from New Lisbon and was repeatedly changing its ZIP code setting to divert attention from that branch.

 Social media ties accomplices together

 Most of the money orders were cashed at post offices in the Philadelphia area, but 22 were passed in Knoxville, where Bowen allegedly recruited residents of homeless shelters to conduct the transactions.

 Nine orders were cashed in post offices around York, Pennsylvania, and one in Jersey City.

 The August 2017 affidavit noted about 50 money orders never surfaced — and the printing machine remained missing.

 Investigators were able to identify lower-level participants, who cashed the money orders for a fee. They then linked their cellphones and Facebook pages to those used by Saunders and the middlemen, the affidavit says.

 More: Mailman hoarded more than 17,000 pieces of mail, authorities say

 It notes one alleged ring member, identified only as M.M., passed a stolen money order in September 2015 — and at the same time bought a legitimate order made out to Saunders, then a Mount Laurel resident.

 The affidavit also notes the men shared family ties and childhood connections.

 It says Bowen and Saunders are cousins, while Sutton told investigators he grew up in the same neighborhood as Bell, attended high school with Saunders, and used to play football with Bowen.

 The affidavit also says Bannon received two faxed letters in June 2017 from Bowen and a payee that used language from the “sovereign citizens” movement to challenge his authority and that of the court system.

 Bell was sentenced July 25, one day after Saunders received his probationary term. Bowen and Sutton were sentenced in June.

 All of the men were sentenced by U.S. District Judge Joseph Rodriguez.

 Follow Jim Walsh on Twitter: @jimwalsh_cp

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