by Jaclyn Marie

Created on: September 10, 2009   Last Updated: September 16, 2009

Chief executives absolutely should have their pay capped at a certain level. Otherwise, where does the madness end?

Because most people don't have the time, nor the desire, to closely comb through the hundreds of proxy statements that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission each year, it largely goes unnoticed by the general public how ridiculously inflated executive pay truly is.

This year, for instance, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf not only will retain his annual salary of $900,000 in 2009, but also will receive an additional $4.7 million in stock, as well as three other executives who are getting large pay raises. What is wrong with this picture? You may recall that Wells Fargo is a recipient of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, of which the company owes billions of dollars in government bailout money.

But Wells Fargo isn't the only company in financial trouble that's touting a money-grows-on-trees attitude. American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley all own aircraft fleets, for instance, that they freely use to cart their executives, and their executives' family members, around in. And that's only to name one wasted expenditure when they're billions of dollars in debt. Albeit, some of these companies say they are scaling back on such perks.

And those are just financial institutions we're talking about. Lest we forget the chief executive officers of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors who flew to Washington in luxury private jets to plead for $25 billion in bailout money.

While the argument can be made that perquisites aren't the same as compensation plans, they are equally relevant to the issue at hand, given that many companies offer cash incentives in place of perquisites, essentially raising an executive's salary even more.

As an example, Qwest CEO Edward Mueller gets a cash payment of $75,000 each year on top of his salary. Although these payments are intended to replace the piecemeal payment of most perquisites, we do not require executives to use the money for any particular purpose and we do not ask executives to report to us the purposes for which the money is used, according to the company's proxy.

None of this is to say that there aren't any well-deserving executives in Corporate America. Quite the contrary, many can be credited with successfully leading their companies out of these rough economic times.

The whole issue around capping executive pay, rather, is to establish

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