Five Quick Questions
How much do you remember about How Much Money Is Too Much?? We'll let you know how you did at the end.
Chapter Resource Center
How Much Money Is Too Much?
America's own tax history already answered this question once — at a 94% top rate. What changed, and what would ‘enough’ look like today?
From Idea to Action
The chapter treats “how much is too much” as a real, answerable question — tracing how America’s top tax rate has swung from 7% to 94% and back down again, then running the actual math on what a maximum-wage policy would look like today.
We've Already Tried Both Extremes
1913: the first federal income tax topped out at 7% on incomes over $500,000 (about $15.9 million today). By 1944, wartime pressure pushed the top rate to 94% on income over $200,000 (~$3.5 million today). Through the 1950s and early ’60s — often remembered as a boom era, not a stagnant one — the top rate held between 82% and 91%. Then the Tax Reform Act of 1986 cut it to 28%. Today’s top bracket sits at 37%.
The Ratio That Changed Everything
CEO pay is now 320 times typical worker pay — up 940% since 1978. Two real, current policies push back on that gap: San Francisco adds a 0.1% local tax surcharge on any company whose top executive earns 100x the median worker (0.2% at 200x). Portland, OR (since 2016) adds a 10% surcharge on public companies where the CEO earns 100–250x the median worker.
Make It Concrete
Earning $1 every second, nonstop, from birth to age 100, adds up to about $3.1 billion. Elon Musk’s 2024 net worth (~$450 billion) exceeded the combined annual budgets of 37 U.S. states, and the annual sales of all but three companies in the entire Fortune Global 500. A 100x-lowest-paid-worker cap, using a $21.46/hour living wage as the floor, would put a ceiling around $4.4 million/year; using the $7.25 federal minimum instead, about $1.5 million.
Talk It Through
The chapter doesn’t argue for one number — it argues the question is legitimate. Where would you personally draw the line between “very successful” and “structurally too much,” and does your answer change depending on whether you’re picking a tax rate, a pay ratio, or a hard cap?