During the 2008 housing bubble burst and the banking crisis that accompanied it, there was quite a fuss made over the bonus packages some bank CEOs were making. Around that time, I happened to be working in the Los Angeles area, and one Friday evening, as I was in a Valencia watering hole soaking up a couple of after-dinner beers, I struck up a conversation with a local guy who happened to be some sort of middle-management type for one of those banks. Being the curious sort, I asked him what he thought of the bonus packages that the legacy media was yapping about at that time, and I've always remembered his answer.

"Well," he told me, "Here's the thing. A lot of these guys' bonus package is based on performance, and it can work like this: A candidate meets with the Board of Directors, and they tell him 'We're in trouble. The bank is expected to lose $100 million in the next year.' The candidate looks over the data and tells the Board, 'I think I can keep the losses to $40 million.' He is hired, and part of his contract is that his bonus will include a percentage of how much he can keep the loss under that dreaded $100 million. He does what he said and is awarded his bonus, but all you hear from the media is that the bank lost $40 million, and the CEO got a $4 million bonus. He may have saved the bank, but the media hounds him over his bonus."

That's not to say that there isn't some dirt there in some cases, but it's sure not limited to the private sector; academia is notorious for double-dipping.

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I don't know how many of those packages in that particular crisis were set like that, and honestly, the guy I was talking to didn't either; he just knew that was a common practice, and I do know from my years as a corporate consultant that a lot of executive packages are based on performance, just like this. But there is a guy in the Senate who neither knows nor cares about this, and he has had a hankering to cut into corporate compensation ever since he honeymooned in the Soviet Union. That guy is Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT,) the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont, and predictably, he's at it again.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and a group of Democratic lawmakers are pushing to raise taxes for companies that pay their chief executives at least 50 times more than their typical worker's salary, saying the bill was needed to limit corporate greed.

The union-backed proposal, which could impact some of the nation's biggest companies and largest employers, would also require Treasury Department guidelines to prevent companies from avoiding the tax by using contractors rather than employees, the senators said in a statement on Monday. 

The bill could generate $150 billion in U.S. revenue over 10 years, while companies could avoid the tax hike by raising workers' pay and reducing CEO salaries, they added.

It is belaboring the obvious to point out that Bernie Sanders has one thing in common with a lot of leftie types in Congress and elsewhere in government: He's never done an honest day's work in his life. His ignorance of all things economic is staggering. He preaches this crap, predictably, from one of his three expansive estates. His net worth is estimated at $3 million (which makes it even more baffling that he always looks like a refugee from a thousand-year flood), but you can color me skeptical that it's that low. And this guy thinks that the Soviet Union had a pretty good thing going.

And the funny thing is that there are big chunks of America's corporate world that agree with him.

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The kicker is that the daffy old Bolshevik from Vermont has no idea how incentives work. This proposal of his wouldn't raise $150 billion. I would be mildly surprised if it raised a red cent. People at this level have ample ways to move their income into tax havens, and corporations likewise. Most of Bernie's proposals would just add to the exodus of corporate headquarters to some more tax-friendly location.

Not to mention that Congress has absolutely no authority to regulate corporate compensation unless the 10th Amendment has been repealed and we didn't notice.

Here's how it would work.

The measure would raise the tax rate on companies whose CEO-to-worker salary ratio was above 50 to 1, starting with a 0.5 percentage-point increase when the top executive earns 50 to 100 times more than the company's average worker, according to the proposed legislation.

The power to tax is the power to destroy, and nobody in Washington illustrates that more clearly than Bernie Sanders.