Lies would mean that there is intent to misinform and afaics I blamed your source, not you. Yes, I would be interested in links/pointers because I couldn't find anything myself and I still cannot believe that there would be a serious attempt and implementing such an impractical policy.

And yes, by that time I was able to read Dutch rather well, especially technical Dutch, and the newspapers/TV I could understand. (In my industry, which was defense systems, the official language was English, as it was for the Dutch Army, Navy, Air Force and NATO.)

The hardest was to speak the language in multiple situations where the vocabulary shifted with the domain: electronics; military systems and tactics; auto repair; politics; food; religion; everyday chat; and so on, plus the inevitable idiomatic expressions that floored me, and the startlingly differing manners or dialogs of speech in almost every town (Twense, for example). But that was, as you say, 35 years ago.

If this situation is of real interest to you, I can have it researched, since I have excellent public, Dutch resources. If it was suppressed, I guess there is no solid proof to be had, so my word will have to suffice. Your call.
I do not post lies.

Oh, well, than of course it must all be taken as absolute proof, if you read the letter 35 years ago yourself. I am amazed at your knowledge of Dutch though; it is not often that Americans are so fluent that they even understand Dutch officialese. And if it was a letter from Dutch companies to Dutch unions cc-ing the Dutch government (but adressing the government of last year) it must have been Dutch.

See, this is why I keep coming back. The comedy. You guys just crack me up. Here's the federal budget. Show us where you're going to start slashing.

Perhaps Sigmund Freud could explain why you casually provided an analogy involving robbery to justify your apparent greed for other people's money -- albeit for the public good, of course.

Well, Mr. Dutchman, I personally read the letter I referred to, and it named the companies participating, and spelled out that they would react if such a 3:1 salary limit was imposed. Since I worked for one of the companies involved, I have no reason to think it was a false letter handed to me to read by the then Director in one of those green executive signing folders. I was not allowed to copy it.

I will admit that the addressee might have been the union, but the government was also addressed or copied. Sorry that my exact memory has faded since the late 70s, but the fundamental facts are as I stated them. I suspect the whole matter was deliberately covered up rather quickly so as not to get the public too aroused by the thought of a general evacuation of their major corporations from Holland. As I recall some of the conversations surrounding that time, it was pointed out to me that many of the corporations had significant management units already in place in the UK(RDS) and US(Philips, Ahold)etc..

The basic statement I made was a paraphrase from Ben Franklin, who was very well known for his "senseless blather". Let the Congress or the people loose on the funds, unencumbered by any restrictions, and it will be our end.

Well, considering that the military budget dwarfs anything domestically, pray tell us how you would like to see it cut?

With all due respect, the reason why people rob banks is that's where the money is. You want to bring spending under control? That's where you'll find the money needed to do that.

With all due respect, the problem isn't what we're paying but what we're spending. Until spending is brought under control no amount of taxation will ever be enough.

When the government and the people realize that they can continue to vote themselves an ever larger share of other people's money and get away with it, that will be the end of the American republic.

You mean like the $9 trillion in debt we have laid on kids and the unborn?

Before the highest income brackets can complain that they are paying more than their fair share, we need to come to grips with the fact that collectively none of us are.

Mannning, do you even know what the income distribution is? C'mon. Let's see if you know how much percentage of total income is garnered by the top 0.1%. Top 1%? Top 2%? How big of a percentage of those on bottom does it take to equal that percentage garnered by a small sliver at the very top?

It's completely absurd to think that people are voting themselves an ever larger share of other people's money. Well, I guess that's technically true in the red states, which get more money back from the federal government than they pay in - that money coming from the blue states, of course.

Wish y'all would walk the walk instead of just babbling incoherently.

Unions don't make laws, government does. Unions can only negotiate with companies so a response to an Unionmade demand would not be a letter to the government.

Political parties have more influence and there may have been a political party that would aim for a ratio between the income of the highest and lowest earners in a company. But even those would never go for a three-to-one ratio.

In 1978 the Netherlands had a ChristenDemocrat/Liberals government; not a very fertile ground for such marxist idea's anyway. AFAIK the most radical union idea (never made it to policy though) was to negotiate for absolute increases, not relative ones, to ensure the biggest benefit would be for the lower incomes.

The unions *were* involved in general policies about wages though. Most famously in our 'akkoord van Wassenaar' in 1982. The government asked the trade union movement and the employers to negotiate a formal agreement on pay restraint and the prevention of unemployment. It was agreed to put jobs above income and workers were given the option of trading pay increases for cuts in working hours. As a result, the working week in many sectors shrank from 40 hours to 38.

Since that agreement wage increases have been much more moderate - except for the CEO's and such. Average union-negotiated wage increases have all been below 5%, whilst top-incomes these past years have been 10-20% on average (not counting the bonus, options and other finacial benefits in the package).

The ten top corporations responded to this threat with a letter to the government. They included Royal Dutch Shell, Ahold, Philips, AMRO, Unilever, and others, saying that if this idea became law, all of these corporations would move their operations to other countries. These ten corporations had the majority of well-paying jobs in the nation... The unions backed down and the government was voted out of office soon after.

There is a lesson here for those who would try leveling of income here in the US.

A billionaire or a corporation can maneuver out from under the US tax system, and base somewhere else in the world, instead of paying a larger and larger share of money to re-distributive taxes. Poland, for example. With that kind of money, he or the corp can exist quite nicely elsewhere. Then, where does the government find another source to feed the mouths of the needful and wantful?

(i) those who slip out of the top quintile (say) are typically at the bottom of that category, and (ii) much of the movement up and down represents fluctuations around a fairly fixed long-term distribution. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan has provided a useful indicator that suggests how persistent high incomes tend to be: the average income of families whose income exceeded $100,000 in 1983 was $176,000 in that year; their average income over the seven-year period ending in 1985 was $153,000.

And Krugman finishes that post up rather nicely by noting Remember, this was back when 100K was a lot of money.