What to do about Wall Street Salaries

While the suggestion I liked the most was the one threatened a while back, which was to tax bonuses at 90% so that after state taxes the executive got very little of their ill-gotten bonus, I think what congress should really be doing is getting to the root of the problem to come up with a solution.

It's not the executives getting the bonus that's the problem, it's the availability of ridiculous amounts of cash available to pay bonuses with a straight face.  These are publicly owned companies that manage to make shareholders happy with impressive gains while at the same time paying huge amounts to employees.  Clearly something else is amiss because whenever any company is making outlandish profits they have some unfair advantage.  That's why the government regulates monopolies and other unfair practices.

So here the government needs to step in and identify what's allowing the banks to be so profitable.  The answer, of course, is that they were leveraging their investments.  If they could use a dollar, borrow another $29 with that and invest $30 total, even a 1% return on the $30 was a 300% profit on the $1.  Of course, when the investments went down they now owed $29 for something that may have been worth only $10-15, but they got bailed out.  Eliminate the ability to leverage and you don't have the risky investing.  Without the risky investing the money has to be retained inside the corporation for the shareholders and can't go to paying thousands of $1M bonuses.  And then we're all in a much safer financial environment to boot!