CEO Pay isn't a problem. Its THE problem.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has introduced legislation capping pay for executives at bailed out companies at $400,000 per year. They, along with the US Chamber of Commerce, have completely lost their shit, stating that they could barely live on that pay, and that this amounts to socialism. Firstly, would everyone on that side of the aisle stop using that word as a bogey word. Joe McCarthy has been dead for fifty-one years.

For years executive pay has been spiraling out of control, now amounting to hundreds of times that of the average worker. Moreover, they are typically given huge packages of options, amounting to tens of thousands of shares. This gives them huge incentive to run up short term profit as much as possible, and then earn bonuses on top of everything else. The extreme of this is obviously the Enron situation, where the executives simply start making shit up. Critics of this bill say that then the execs will have no incentive to do well. Sure they do. If I have a job, and I don't do well, I lose that job. If I run a company, and I lose tens of billions of dollars, I should get fired!