实战口语情景对话 第815期:Salary Caps 工资上限

Todd: So Greg in the last one we were talking about minimum wage, and this is one of the topics in your book and it's about income disparity. One of the chapters is about income disparity. Now the opposite would be should there the a salary cap, which would mean that basically you could only earn so much, like let's say you can only earn five million dollars, ten million dollars. Nobody could earn more than that. What do you think about that concept?
托德：格雷格，上期我们谈论了最低工资，你书中提到的一个问题是收入差距。你书中有一章专门讲述了收入差距。今天我们要谈的是相反的话题，应该设定工资上限吗？工资上限是指限定人们只能挣这么多钱，假设说只能挣500万美元或1000万美元。没有人的工资能超过这个限定。你怎么看这个概念？

Greg: I personally agree with a salary cap. I'm not sure how much it should be, but definitely the discrepancy in wages is way to great. There's too many people who have to ... a husband and a wife work hard forty hours or more, both of them. They're barely, barely getting by, and then you got all these other people who are just buying Rolls-Royce cars and Mercedes, and country clubs and it's just not fair.
格雷格：我个人同意设定工资上限。我不能确定限额应该设定多少，但是我认为工资差异这一问题太严重了。有许多人……有的家庭夫妻两人可能都要工作40个小时以上。这样他们还只是勉强糊口而已，可是也有人能买得起劳斯莱斯和奔驰，去乡村俱乐部享乐，这太不公平了。

Todd: But, well, for one, though I mean, Mercedes and Rolls-Royce and those are products that provide jobs, so I would argue with that. Actually, as you can probably tell, I'm against the idea mainly because, you know, I think that hurts innovation. You know, you look at people like the CEO of a very powerful internet company or software company, and you know, take google for example, I'm sure that they make more than ten million, but they're service is used so much around the world, that they should get that money, and if people couldn't ... hang on ... if people couldn't get ... couldn't earn that salary then maybe they wouldn't have the same motivation and drive to be successful and that people would lose out as a result.
托德：首先，奔驰和劳斯莱斯是产品，这些产品会提供工作岗位，所以对这个问题持不同看法。实际上，我并不同意这个观点，因为我认为工资上限会损害创新性。你看，像强大的互联网公司或软件公司的首席执行官，比如谷歌公司吧，我确定他们的工资超过1000万美元，可是全世界都在使用他们的服务，他们应该得到这笔工资，如果他们不能……等一下，让我说完，如果他们不能挣到这么多钱，那他们可能不会这么有动力，不会成功，他们最终可能会失败。

Greg: I think that there's not proof to say that these people are making these products because they're making such tremendous amounts of money. What came first: the product and then they got the money in most cases. There's ... these people could be ... society can have all sorts of wonderful products and still have a fair income system, and I have nothing against people becoming rich or making a good salary, a very good salary, but not such an incredible gap. You have executives of some major international corporations that are making more money than millions of people in the world make combined. The opposite side of not having a cap is that you have people who are making too little, and those people are also working hard. Those people deserve validation. Those people deserve a good life standard which millions of people across the world are not having.
格雷格：我认为没有证据表明因为他们挣的钱很多，就说明是他们制造了这些产品。想一下，是先有的产品还是他们大部分情况下先挣到了钱。这些人……这个社会既可以有各种出色的产品，也可以有公平的工资体系，我并不反对人们变得富有，也不反对他们有不错的收入，我反对的是如此大的工资差距。主要互联网公司执行官的工资比世界上数百万人的工资总合还要多。没有工资上限就会造成有的人工作非常努力，可是挣得特别少。而这些人值得获得认可。这些人值得拥有好的生活标准，可是世界上数百万人都享受不到这种生活标准。

Todd: Well, I think ... well, I agree with you about that. I agree with you about that. That there's people who work hard and that they're under compensated, but ... and they're a lot of people that get grossly overpaid but I think that's just a problem of management and that in some cases so people do deserve millions and millions, perhaps billions of dollars if they have really contributed to the product or the outcome. So, basically we're gonna disagree on this one.
托德：我认为……这方面我同意你的观点。我同意你的看法。有些人工作努力，可是挣的很少，也有很多人收入过高，不过我认为这只是管理问题，在某些情况下，如果有人对产品或成果的贡献很大，那他们就值得获得数百万美元甚至数十亿美元的收入。所以基本上来说，我们两人在这个问题上持不同看法。

Greg: Yeah.
格雷格：对。