What Regular Joe In Milwaukee Makes $5 Million a Year Selling Beer?

I was on Fox and Friends earlier this week to discuss efforts to restrict executive pay at companies subsidized by taxpayers. You can watch the clip here.

It's really important to see the right-wing narratives that run underneath the conservative movement's ideology. In this case, you'll hear the Fox Business analyst insist that stopping huge taxpayer-subsidized payouts to Wall Street executives who lost their companies money and empowering company shareholders to regulate CEO pay is akin to punishing a Regular Joe in Milwaukee who makes $5 million a year selling beer. Of course, when I ask him what Regular Joe in Milwaukee is making $5 million a year selling beer, he has no example - and he also has no answer as to why company shareholders should be barred from setting the compensation rates of their CEO employees.

And that's the whole point: The Right makes up seemingly logical arguments about liberals wanting to punish hard-working Americans - but the arguments are based on the most wildly fantastical assumptions. That these assumptions have become so ubiquitous is only proof that our whole "American Dream" mythology has been hijacked by the most extremist ideological actors in our political system. It's time to take that mythology back, and root it in reality.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future