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As for the salaried executives who spend their lives working up the ladders of big U.S. companies, an increasing number are learning that they, too, can become wealthy, if not millionaires. The device: stock option plans, which many companies use as an incentive. Under the plans, a company usually gives an employee an option to buy its stock at 5% below market prices. If the stock goes up, the executive can take the profit, pay the capital-gains tax. One out of every three companies (some 400) on the New York Stock Exchange now has a stock option plan for employees; the average gain in a survey of 263 company officers was $83,000 per man by mid-October 1954. When George M. Bunker, for example, took over the bossing of the sick Glenn L. Martin Co. in 1952, he got an option on 70,000 shares at $9.75 a share. Martin stock now sells at $30, and President Bunker already has a paper profit of $1,425,900, as a capital gain. Considering their own millions, and the dozens of ways for making more, the new U.S. tycoons have little sympathy for those who believe the myth that the day of opportunity is ended. Says Los Angeles' Ahmanson, speaking for all his class: "The chance for a big jackpot is just as good as it ever was —maybe better. The trouble is, too many people like to rationalize themselves into the comfortable conviction that it can't be done, so there's no use trying."
*Which became law in 1921 to get an additional source of U.S. revenue. At first, the rate was 12½%, was later boosted to 25%. As income taxes climbed, the capital-gains tax remained the same (except for a temporary jump to 26%), on the theory that 1) those who risk capital are entitled to a lower rate on profits, 2) high capital-gains taxes would paralyze business by drying up risk capital, and 3) it is unfair to apply annual income-tax rates to profits that it may have taken a lifetime to build up.