I agree that those are bad ideas.
I don't have any brilliant, transformational ideas. Some things I am in favor of--
1. Make it easier for shareholders to control/change their Boards of Directors in public companies. Currently, the BoD of most companies do a terrible job of setting compensation. The shareholders have no real recourse but to sell their stock. I think that if shareholders had a little more control, we might avoid some of the heads I win/tails you lose compensation packages that seem to have become standard for CEOs.
2. Stop trying to reduce taxes on capital. Our taxes on earned income are extremely high, while our taxes on capital have been dropping for decades, both in the capital gains/dividend rate and the effective tax rate for corporations. At this point it might make sense to just do away with the corporate income tax entirely in return for setting the capital gains/dividend rate back to ordinary income. With all the games that the big multi-nationals can play with deciding which susidiary gets attributed which income, the corporate income tax is approaching being voluntary for the multinationals anyway.
2b. If capital gains continue to get special treatment, stop letting hedge fund managers classify their earned income as capital gains.
3. Index the minimum wage to inflation
4. Reform/update the structure of unions to maintain workers bargaining power as a group while allowing for a better method of merit pay than senority. I'm fuzzy on details here, and maybe there isn't a good answer to this problem. I see the problems with unions as they exist today, but I also suspect that the removal of unions will increase the current downward pressure on wages for the bottom 80% of the population.
5. I'd love to come up with a way to reduce the influence that the top folks have on the writing of the rules, but I can't think of anything that is going to work. My only hope is that self-interest will keep them from stacking the deck so much in their favor that the system collapses, thus my efforts to convince a few people that it is an issue of importance.
So, we seem to be good at whining about the income inequality situation, but how do we fix it? I'm convinced that simply taxing those who make a bunch isn't necessarily the best idea. Sure, we can seize, through sky high taxes, most of what those making 150X average make, but they're still making it and will simply focus on eluding the tax man. How can we have them not make it in the first place? How can we control the income of pro athletes, entertainers, CEO's, entrepreneurs, highly compensated professionals and the rest of those devils?