CEO compensation in the United States may have finally crossed the line — from outrageously unfair to intolerably obscene. In 2018, a new Institute for Policy Studies report details, 50 major U.S. corporations paid their top execs over 1,000 times the pay that went to their most typical workers.

What can we do about obscenity this raw? Plenty. We can start by placing consequences on the CEO-worker pay ratios that publicly traded U.S. corporations must now annually disclose.

In Oregon, the city of Portland already has. Since 2017, major companies that do business in Portland have had to pay the city’s business tax at a higher rate if they compensate their top execs at over 100 times what they pay their median — most typical — workers.

State lawmakers have introduced similar legislation in seven states, and, earlier this week, White House hopeful Bernie Sanders announced a plan to hike the U.S. corporate income tax rate on all large firms that pay their top execs over 50 times their worker pay. Some context: A half-century ago, few U.S. corporations paid their chief execs over 25 times what their workers earned.

The new Sanders plan has drawn predictable scorn from the usual suspects. One analyst from the right-wing Manhattan Institute, for instance, told the Washington Post that a pay-ratio tax “could dramatically affect industries such as fast food and retail that naturally pay lower wages.”

Corporations pay “what the market demands,” added Adam Michel from the equally conservative Heritage Foundation, “and levying new taxes on high pay will just make U.S. businesses less able to compete globally, expand their workforces, or raise wages of rank and file workers.”

But the idea of taxing firms with top-heavy pay patterns at higher rates also has critics in circles that usually scorn the free-market fundamentalism of conservative think tanks. These critics — like Eric Toder of the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center — see the progressive income tax as the more appropriate antidote to CEO pay excess.

High tax rates on high incomes, analysts who share this perspective point out, can dampen excessive executive pay. Corporate boards aren’t going to bother shelling out multiple millions to CEOs if most of those millions will simply end up going to Uncle Sam.

In the mid-20th century, with incomes over $400,000 facing a 91 percent tax rate, that shelling out certainly did dampen. Compensation at the corporate summit flatlined in the decades right after World War II — and even sometimes dipped, as DuPont president Crawford Greenwalt groused to Congress in 1955. His predecessor three decades earlier, Greenwald testified, made twice what he was making in the 1950s.

Corporate attorney Michael Trotter would graduate into this deflated executive-compensation world — from the Harvard Law School — in the early 1960s. The nation’s “high marginal income tax rates,” he would remember years later, “largely kept executive compensation in check.”

But those high marginal tax rates could not be sustained, not in the United States, not in any country in the world that levied high taxes on high incomes in the middle of the 20th century. So what lesson ought we take from our tax-the-rich history? Simply this: Redistribution alone — via progressive tax rates — will never be enough to build and sustain a more equal society. We also need to focus on how societies predistribute our wealth.