Overpriced. Overpaid. Over and over again.

JC Penny is going backward. The fired CEO gets $23 million.  Verizon is going to lay off 17,000 workers and the CEO gets $22 million. And on and on it goes. What’s wrong with this picture?  I’ll tell you what. There is not a CEO in America worth more than $1 million a year. Period. Not one.

I’ve worked for a lot of thee men and women. They have been my clients and I can tell you, most of them are dullards. They are good with numbers when it comes to spreadsheets, but come with a new idea? No way. They haven’t got a clue.

And because of the outlandishly high salaries that the executives of companies are getting to “manage money,” that is what the truly smart brains are going into in B school. Money management. Forget making something. Forget coming up with an idea that will start a new industry or revitalize and old one. Forget about creativity being taken to the marketplace and tried out in a free-enterprise situation. Forget about creating something new and exciting.

No. Today, America is about paying a few people tons and tons of cash and stock options to run the ship for a few years. Really?  To guide JCP into the ground cost $23 million? I would have done it for a quarter of that. And so would a lot of you.

CEO and CFO and CMO and COO’s are all overpaid fat cats who are sitting back collecting the rewards of the American worker who is making less and less and less. That is unless you are the CEO of Apple and you really don’t have many American workers. Most of yours are in China and Indonesia. And Apple is not alone in this.

But the point is simply this. I don’t think there is a picture worth $20 million in baseball. I didn’t think Alex Rodrigues was worth his fortunes. Not then. Not today. I don’t think the head of Chase, Bank of America, Texas Instruments, ExxonMobil, G.E., PepsiCo…the list goes on and on are worth the money we pay them. And we, I mean the stockholders of these companies. I’ve owned most of these. My dividends haven’t shot through the roof. They haven’t gone off like skyrockets on the 4^th of July. But the CEO’s salaries sure have.

Classroom teachers make 40-50K in Dallas. The new DISD Communications Director is going to make $180,000. See the disparity? And it only gets worst as you climb the ladder. I can tell you a great classroom teacher is worth a whole lot more than some talking head bimbo the DISD is now going to pay. For that matter they are far more important and worth more to America than most CEO’s.

It is time we get salaries realigned with reality. The top guy in the company might not be the CEO. That position might well belong to the design engineer who comes up with the next great widget that sets the industry on its ear. The CEO shouldn’t make $20 gazillion just to watch it and hold press conferences and meet with the board. But that engineer might be worth it.

God knows the schoolteacher is worth more than we pay them, because it was that schoolteacher who motivated that engineering student in math and science.

American: the land of the rich and the home of the getting richer. Not an idea I signed on for. How about you?