Maximum profit, minimum wage
Congratulations to Exxon Mobil, the new world-record holder for highest corporate profits in a single calendar year! The company’s 2006 total of $39.5 billion surpassed, by $3.4 billion, the previous record, which was set by Exxon Mobil’s 2005 earnings, which one year earlier had knocked — you guessed it — Exxon Mobil’s 2004 earnings from the top of the list.
If you find these numbers difficult to visualize (as most humans do), $39.5 billion over the course of a year works out to $1,252 every second. That’s $1,252 in per-second profit — what’s left after they’ve paid for everything.
For comparison’s sake, a minimum-wage worker (an attendant at one of Exxon Mobil’s thousands of service stations, say) makes $5.15 an hour, or 14 hundredths of a cent every second. A bill in Congress right now would raise the hourly rate to $7.25, or 20 hundredths of a cent per second.
Catching up!
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