Raise taxes on million-buck salaries

In 1970, 41 years ago, the top CEO “total compensation” was 20 times the average salary paid to their employees. Today the average executive “total compensation” is more than 500 times the average salary paid to their employees.

The provision in the Dodd-Frank Act in the Wall Street Regulatory Overhaul Act passed last year, was designed to bring this greed to the attention of stockholders.

The article in the Aug. 23 business section of the Chicago Tribune points out that this provision is under attack by business leaders and conservative members of Congress. Yet this “issue of income inequality in the United States over the last 30 years, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and elsewhere cited by its author Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, it has ballooned from 42-1 to more than 300-1.”

This provision to monitor/report this ratio must not be changed. Any argument to drop this reporting provision is only self-serving to the greedy rich executives and to those that gain their election funding dollars.

The claim that determining these ratios is too complicated and time wasteful is an in-crowd weak argument when so much time is spent by these executives and their team of lawyers to figure out how to hide these figures, by hiding their compensation in trusts or overseas accounts.

These lawyer specialists figure out these tax dodges to cheat the honest, hard working citizens who pay their fair share of taxes every year.

Let’s stop politicking verbiage like “we do not want tax increases” or “we do not want government regulations” as catchall, non specific, language that is used to scare the voting public into support. We are sick of the politicians using this non-definitive language style.

Increasing taxes on only the million-plus incomes does make sense.

Larry Norgaard

St. Charles