Economic Reality Even A Conservative Can Understand

Proving CEOs are overpaid is easy. I'm a conservative and I agree with you. Very few CEOs deliver enough shareholder value to justify their compensation. As I recall it was Home Depot that gave CEO Robert Nardelli a $200 million severance package -- JUST TO GO AWAY! In a bizarre way, it was money well spent!

Giving a raise to the 99% is what Carter tried. See Carter, Jimmy. See also: "worst Presidents in history", inflation, unemployment, and stagflation.

You want to help the 99%? First, ignore the CEO for the time being. It's a meaningless number in the big picture of the economy. Focus on what corporate management DOES and why they do it.

One step below the CEO is the CFO. The compensation is almost as ridiculous as the CEO. The main purpose of the CFO is to maximize profitability by making financial decisions. Most of these decisions are driven (either directly or indirectly) by idiotic US tax policy. Beyond the issue of "Loony Tunes" executive compensation, every major corporation has an entire department full of accountants playing smoke-and-mirrors tax tricks, usually at the expense of the 99%.

Cut corporate taxes to zero so that corporations can get the benefits of off-shoring without actually going offshore to do it. Let them distribute 100% of profits they declare in the US to their shareholders, most of whom will be US taxpayers anyway. My version of tax reform would cut useless overhead by firing every corporate tax accountant in the country. This would cause the multinationals to bleed their foreign subsidiaries dry, returning jobs to the US -- and higher wages to the 99%. With a newfound emphasis on dividends, even CEO compensation would get hit when the board of directors starts squeezing the entire enterprise for dividends instead of tax dodges.

Or we can just clamor for "Carter II" to let the inflation genie out of the bottle. Because that worked so well in the mid 1970's? Really?

You have the same utter ignorance that most Right Wingers do, Kat. You assume that anyone who isn't a multimillionaire is struggling due to laziness or lack of desire, when the reality is that a man making minimum wage generally works a hell of a lot harder on the average day than someone like Mitt Romney, who hasn't actually WORKED a day in his life but has just taken daddy's money and used it to make more money. What President Obama has been talking about for three years is making sure that all of those people who DO have the desire and DO make the effort have an opportunity to improve themselves through their own efforts. What the Right Wing has been doing is destroying those opportunities. They have dumbed down and defunded our education system so that a lot of people never have the chance to improve themselves. They have shipped millions of jobs overseas so that even if someone does get through school (and doesn't "goof off") they wind up working at McDonald's because the jobs simply aren't there. To Mitt Romney, not having a job is meaningless, since the dividend checks just keep on rolling in. But to the average American, not having a job is a death sentence.

It's pretty disgusting for you to simply assume that people choose to be poor. You've chosen to be poor in intellect, understanding, and certainly compassion, but most people don't make that choice. I think that's what bothers you. The poor people getting an opportunity might mean that they can live a better life than you do. And we can't have that, now can we.