While fast food workers stage a one-day strike, a report from the Global Economy Project shows how the industry’s CEOs have subsidized their own multimillion dollar salaries with taxpayer funds in addition to saving money by paying employees low wages. Report author Sarah Anderson explains.

Anderson, who is director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told “Democracy Now!” on Thursday of the finding, “this is a perverse loophole in our tax code that essentially means that the more corporations pay their CEO, the less they pay in taxes. And that’s because there is this loophole that allows companies to deduct unlimited amounts from their corporate income taxes for the expense of executive pay, as long as it’s so-called performance pay—so, stock options and other bonuses that are configured in a way to qualify for this tax loophole. And what it means essentially is that ordinary taxpayers are subsidizing excessive CEO pay.”