Web Letters: Pay-Cap Populism

Caps on salary are a bad idea. What needs to be done is to raise the tax rates to 70 percent above a million. But you say: "Higher taxes! We can't have that!" That was the rate when Reagan took over.

When you employ salary caps you are taxing work. What about the income that the truly wealthy get--capital gains, tax free bonds and dividends? Should we put a cap on these incomes as well?

We need higher tax rates on all income. Capping salaries sounds good but doesn't touch the already wealthy and their "unearned income." Salary caps are a convenient red herring employed by the politicians to avoid the real issue, that we need higher tax rates on the top end.

The only way to shrink the wealth gap is to tax wealth more heavily, and that means higher taxes on all income, earned and unearned, for everyone in the top 1 percent.

Michael McKinlay

Hercules, CA