Fair Profit

The SEC requires businesses to regularly submit public financial statements. These help shareholders evaluate profitability.

By wading through theses financial statements, we can track how businesses spend money your money. Other sources can also be useful, particularly for identifying overpaid management.

We are working on automatically importing company names and data from the SEC databases. Unfortunately, some facts aren't reported there and need to researched separately. Additionally different types of business, like co-ops, do not have to file statements with the SEC. These business need to be included in a different way

You can help by registering as an editor and entering the information yourself. We are designing this site to be a wiki. As an editor, you can go to the SEC pages or find other sources and create and edit company pages.

Company pages with sufficient data are automatically calculated to determine how much money goes to upper management and to investors, i.e. to the top 1%. These companies can be compared to others in the same industry or region and are rated as fair or unfair.

Once we have enough data, we can compare the behavior of groups of industries to define more precisely fair and unfair. But for now a good starting point is that a fair business directs less than 10% of their revenue to the top 1%

to be removed later: (for input on design and financial calculations)

How to figure out the proportion of a particular purchase is going to the top ~1%?

Currently the amount going directly to shareholder and owners (to_shareholder) is calculated by adding the stock_dividend_paid + share_repurchase + other_dividends - new_stock_sales. ( this does not capture any upper management pay)

The difference between profit and (to_shareholder) is taken to be the amount reinvested in the business. This is a catchall term but still may not be a reasonable assumption.

Also since profit margins are very low for any given business (1-5%) it is important to think about the rest of their revenue. A very large portion of that goes to the companies that they do business with, many of which also have shareholders. That amount swamps the profit margin of the individual company, and for the sake of thinking about a single consumers money, on average ~40% of THAT money also ends up in the pockets of the 1%.

One of my biggest concerns in trying to track money is the financial system. Businesses don't actually figure their profits and then take that actual money to distribute or reinvest. Instead they are continuously borrow and repaying loans. In fact they are taking out new loans to repay old ones. The interest and fees on those loans amounts to money to stakeholders in the financial system and also represents a stream reinforcing income inequality. Some SEC 10-K have a current debt interest reported value. Currently, I am assuming ~40% of this also enriches the top 1%. This is probably an underestimation.