A strange correlation: CEO and executive compensation packages have been growing at roughly the same rate as political donations over the past 15 years.
The
executive compensation packages have been growing at a steady pace for
the past fifteen years, with a fairly reliable average for this data
because of the large number of firms that are reporting; despite the
unreported pension and bonus numbers. The total has roughly tripled.
Donations to political parties have grown rapidly during this same period. The data is hard to find and hard to compare because different elections bring out different levels of contribution. But the political total has risen at about the same rate as executive compensation.
I suspect a connection.
Back, many decades, when I was a Bank of California vice president, we executives were given bonuses which we were expected to use to make political donations to designated candidates. The designation was done by our in-house politico.