Put America's rich to work for America! Make them all into Heroes.

Progressive tax base, the more you benefit from society, the more you contribute to the maintenance of the society.
Life time wealth cap of 100 million dollars. Any and all wealth generated over 100 million is taxed at 99%.
You can get to and cruse at 100 million.
Inheritance/bequithment cap at 12.5 million dollars. You can gift your children and others up to 100 million dollars, but it must be done while you're alive.


Currently I am not advocating taking the fortunes of billionaires, I'm just saying these should be the last ones. Bragging about how many billionaires your society can support is like bragging about how many and the incredible length of your tapeworms.

But, the devil is in the details: Where do you draw the cap? You want to have a good incentive for achievement, but at the same time, you want to promote fairness and lessen inequality, corruption and abuse. It would be a real thorny and hard to decide issue, in my opinion, even if the influence of corporate lobbyists was not so pervasive.

But a key principle that I think should govern all this is accountability and responsibility. I think we should eliminate the corporate culture that makes these "golden parachutes" possible, and makes it possible for a CEO to absolutely wreck or trash a corporation, and then make out like a bandit with a golden severance package that absolutely sucks whatever life blood is left out of the company they wrecked. I think that, if CEO compensation were tied to personal and company performance, that would have a very positive and constructive effect on our economy. The moral for corporate CEOs would be: Your own welfare and compensation is intimately tied in with the good of the whole operation. And that's what business is supposed to be all about, isn't it???

I was born and raised in Japan, and in Japanese corporate culture, there is a motto: Kyozon, kyoei. In other words, if we stay together, we prosper together.

I'm not sure that I agree with a cap, but I do believe an 80 - 90% tax should be levied against income over a particular amount. If the threshold were 90% for any amount earned over 750K, or even 1M, then you'd see that most executives would self-impose a salary cap and the excess would go back into the company.

The larger issue though is stock options. I'm of the opinion that an executive should not be allowed to own any portion of the company that they work for. With stock options, focus shifts from company and customer, to shareholder and stock value. Ever wonder why the product or service that you're purchasing is crap? Because you - the customer - really don't matter anymore.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottdecarlo/2012/04/04/americas-highest-paid-ceos/