In its most recent annual analysis of CEO pay, USA TODAY found that median pay among chief executives running most of the nation's 100 largest companies soared 25% to $17.9 million in 2005.

To put this in perspective, the average American full-time worker made $659 a week in 2005, or $34,268 a year in 2005. The median figure of $17,900,000 for CEOs cited by USA TODAY is 522 times that of the typical worker.

The ten CEOs at the top of the USA TODAY compensation list had average annual compensation in 2005 of $124,325,771 (yes, that is 124 million dollars) -- 3,600 times greater than the average American worker. This breaks out to $2,702,734 weekly and $67,568 hourly.

In other words, it took one of these top ten CEOs about one-half hour to make as much as the average American worker makes in one year. Is that mind-boggling or what?

To make matters worse, the typical American worker's 2005 earnings increased by less than the rate of inflation for the same period, resulting in a net loss of purchasing power.

A Key Question, posed by U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, when questioning Thomas Lehner, the director of public policy for the influential Business Roundtable during a House Financial Services Committee session:

"Is it morally appropriate that America's 13,000 richest families are making as much income as the nation's bottom 20 million families combined?"

What do you think? Sound off in the PA Economics Forum.

Recently Congress hurriedly passed legislation that extends, by two years, the tax cuts on capital gains and dividend income originally enacted in 2003, which were set to expire in 2008.

Why the big rush to extend tax breaks that don't expire until 2008?  At the polls this November, Republican leaders fear that American voters will push back against inequitable tax cuts and the deluge of corruption that consumes our elected representatives.

Advocates for the recent vote were hard-pressed to justify legislation that hands a measly $20 a year in tax cuts to average Americans and $41,977 to taxpayers who make over $1 million. Instead, they argued that opponents of the tax cut are trying to create a "class war."

However, "class war" appears to be just what congressional leaders are waging, and not just because last week's tax bill tilts overwhelmingly to the rich. House and Senate leaders deliberately omitted from last week's bill some expiring tax breaks that benefit average Americans -- items that include a $4,000 deduction for college tuition that middle-income parents can take and a deduction for classroom supplies that teachers buy with their own dollars.    Wake up America!!! We need new, responsible leaders in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

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Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in The Chance for Peace,
a speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953
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"Short of changing human nature, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war."

Richard M. Nixon, in Real Peace, 1983
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"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."

George Bush Sr., in A World Transformed, 1998

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