179-1

From MSNBC:

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service helps to put the executive pay issue into a real-world context. CEOs make, on average, 179 times as much as rank and file workers, double the 90-to-1 ratio in 1994, according to the agency’s calculations.

Options grants and stock awards helped boost CEO pay as much as six-fold during the 1990s economic expansion, according to compensation consultant Donald Delves. Then the stock market bubble burst in 2000 — but CEO pay hasn’t come down since.

By contrast, median household income edged up only 8.6 percent from 1990 to 2005, according to U.S. Census data.

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as CEO pay since 1990, it would be worth $22.61 today, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Instead, the federal minimum wage will increase to $5.85 an hour on July 24, the first increase in a decade.

And to think all it took to get that measly increase in the minimum wage was to put it in on the backs of the soldiers who will die in Iraq thanks to Bush's war as that's all the Dems "won" in the last tangle over war funding.

It's time to discuss a maximum wage law, methinks. And then don't say no one will strive and innovate, for I want the max wage to be a ratio, not a set figure. A CEO can't make more than oh, 75 times what his average worker makes. The more that worker makes, the more the CEO can make. Now go figure out your company's salary scale.

You can't tell me Yahoo's Terry Semel needs $70 mil a year--what in the world do you do with that? If we can boo Alex Rodriguez for making $25 mil a year just because he doesn't homer in every at-bat, what should we do for Semel and his fellow over-compensated CEOs?