My jaw dropped when I read in your column that polls show that a near majority of Americans think they don"t pay any taxes or think that because they get a refund they think got their taxes back . (That's what you seemed to imply.) I have NEVER heard ANYONE with a job say that's what they thought. And I've lived in three states among highly diversifed populations. Who the heck was polled? People with a first grade education or those on Welfare? I have never thought too highly of polls, and this is why. The results are so often ridiculous that it seems pollsters must make them up, or skew their results by the type of people or questions asked despite protestations of objectivity. This must be true when you see the totally different results among TV news polls. They cannot all be right. One other thing, when talking about people wanting to see anyone punished for being rewarded for failure in the big corporations, you put the word failure in quotation marks as if failure was not what they did and reward was not what they received. If a company does not at least maintain the status quo, but actually lost amazing amounts of money, would you not say that is failure without quotation marks? Besides the fact that no one on the planet who has not found the cure for all diseases, managed to feed the entire population of the world healthy food, and has created total peace in the whole world is worthy of making more than a $1,000,000 including perks and benefits (and I am being generous here), no one who allows a corporation to do a freefall should get any salary and certainly no exit benefits and pension. Needless to say, I hope, those people should be fired immediately. How can anyone who does this be considered one of those people that corporations are always saying they need to obscenely reward in order to keep these or acquire these smart, good people? How smart and good can they be when they fail so miserably? There's probably millions who could fail equally well for less money and benefits. There are probably thousands who could keep a company profitable as well for less money and benefits. Please don't put failure in quotation marks when talking about these greedy, subhuman creatures who are laughing over the pot of gold they were rewarded.