Those US bankers just don't get it. Goldman Sachs has stunned everyone by giving its chief executive Lloyd Blankfein a $9 million year end bonus. It's no cash, just stock. But with the Goldman Sachs share price sitting at over $154, he's really raking it in.

All this is in contrast to the pay for ordinary workers with BusinessWeek reporting their wages have been flat for nearly 20 years, rising only 0.1% from 1979 to 2007. And that was before the economic crisis hit.

Now Goldman Sachs would say Blankfein has made a big sacrifice. The $9 million bonus is a significant reduction on the $68 million bonus he collected in 2007. But when you look at it from the outside, you can see these people are still eating our lunch.

Which is why the pressure on the bankers to reduce their lucrative bonuses will continue. That's why US senators have iintroduced legislation that would impose a 50% excise tax on bonuses of employees at firms that exceed $400,000 in 2009, an amount equivalent to Barack Obama's salary. Any employee who received a bonus larger than $400,000, would have to pay the tax on that portion of the bonus that's over $400,000. The revenues generated would be used to reduce the deficit or to help the nation recover from the recession.

Until this is fixed, the massive gaps in US society will get wider and in the long term, that will do a lot of damage.