The 100 top-paid CEOs of the public companies that have headquarters or big operations in the Philadelphia region are evidence that the trend continues, even in recent years.
Research firm Equilar Inc. found that median total pay rose 11.96 percent in 2010, compared with 2009.
How is this still happening, especially given how terrible things are for workers, consumers, even our federal government, which recently barely avoided a global debt default?
For answers, we have to roll back the clock by decades.
A study was published in November, which examined tax return data from 1979 to 2005. Its findings about Americans with annual incomes above $1.7 million, including capital gains, are interesting.
In 2004, the largest cast of characters in that top 0.1 percent of the nation's income distribution were not bankers, financiers, sports figures or celebrities.
In fact, within that teenie tiny percentage of the most lavishly compensated American workers, roughly 41 percent - four out of 10 - were people who identified themselves on tax returns as executives, managers or supervisors of non-financial companies.
And 18.4 percent more were people in the famously enriching financial professions.
Taken together, the elite coalition accounted for six out of 10 of the highest-income Americans both that year and in 2005, according to the research by Jon Bakija at Williams College, Adam Cole of the Treasury Department and Bradley T. Heim of Indiana University.
Those non-financial corporate top guns also saw their cut of the national pie grow during that stretch of time. In 1979, they represented 1.37 percent of national income (excluding capital gains); by 2005, that had grown to 3.42 percent.
