If we reinstated a steeply progressive tax rate, with a top rate of 75 to 90%, then you would never see this story, it wouldn’t exist. The decision makers would not authorize these kind of obscene pay rates knowing that the bulk of the pay would simply go directly into the federal tax coffers. In the face of steeply progressive tax rates, business profits would go into infrastructure, into balanced wages across the entire employee spectrum, into anything but line items that would be decimated by the tax man.

We stand at the confluence of two terrible ideas, deregulation and a flattened tax table that frankly dares CEOs to make stupid decisions, take crazy risks in order to fatten their bonus incomes. If the crazy risks crash the company and cause a CEO or CFO to get fired, that person may be forced to figure out how to live the rest of their lives on their last year salary of perhaps only 5 to 15 million dollars.

Meanwhile, Congress, and especially the Republicans have not extended the unemployment benefits for workers who have lost their jobs as the result of financial risk-taking by these “captains of industry.”

And, the laid off workers were not in the line collecting a bonus that they could easily live on for the rest of their lives.

We need to rethink the basic economic principles in the US. It starts with a steeply progressive tax rate that does away with this kind of excess. That is the cornerstone for a stable economy.