If you're a billionaire hedge-fund manager or a well-compensated CEO, watch out: One of your peers is coming for your bottom line.
When it comes to economics, Donald Trump's otherwise-very-conservative presidential campaign has struck a surprisingly — and increasingly — populist tone. He wants to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy, such as the carried-interest exemption that allows some hedge-fund managers and venture capitalists to pay a lower tax rate than average Americans. He wants to raise taxes on his fellow billionaires, including himself.
And Sunday, Trump indicated he would also like to lower CEO pay. In an interview with John Dickerson on CBS's "Face the Nation," Trump said CEO pay in this country has become a "complete joke."
"It's a shame, and it's disgraceful.… And you see these guys making enormous amounts of money, and it's a total and complete joke," he said.
Trump said he's not sure exactly how to go about lowering CEO pay, which Dickerson pointed out is about 350 times as much as what the average American makes. Trump said the problem is that CEOs often install their friends as board members, and cronyism ensues.
"It's very hard if you have a free-enterprise system to do anything about that," Trump said.
In retrospect, his comments about CEO pay probably shouldn't be surprising. Economic populism is fast becoming a go-to line for him — despite (and, in some ways, because of) his extreme wealth. Trump is casting himself as a guy familiar with the excesses of the country's wealthy class. He has lived it in his gold-plated home and gold-plated jet.
In Sunday's interview, Trump slammed establishment candidates Hillary Clinton and former Florida governor Jeb Bush for taking campaign money from hedge-fund managers. The fact that Trump, who has made billions in real estate, doesn't have to raise money from other billionaires has been a frequent applause line for him on the campaign trail.
Perhaps following Trump's lead, other GOP candidates have also begun calling out income inequality and suggesting that taxes on the wealthy should be raised.
But few Republican candidates hammer home the point like Trump does. And it's becoming clearer that it wasn't just a one-off position he took on raising taxes on the wealthy.
Amber Phillips writes about politics for The Fix. She was previously the one-woman D.C. bureau for the Las Vegas Sun and has reported from Boston and Taiwan.
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