Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton said the pay of top corporate executives has gotten out of control.

He complained that the Exxon Mobil chief was paid a $450 million bonus, reports Rob Christensen.

"To tell you what a $450 million bonus means, it is a half penny on the sales tax for nine milion people of North Carolina for a full year,” he told an AFL-CIO meeting this morning in Raleigh.

He was referring to a retirement package awarded Lee Raymond, Exxon’s CEO in 2005, that was reportedly worth $400 million.

“I believe in capitalism,” Dalton said. But he said corporate pay has gotten out of hand.

“We’ve got to have a fair playing field,” Dalton said. “When I graduated from college, the average pay of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company was 20 times what the average worker was paid. Today, it is 364 times the average pay.”

The average CEO pay for a Fortune 500 company today is $11 million, he said.

Update: Civitas, the Raleigh-based conservative group, gigged Dalton, noting that he has owned more than $10,000 of worth of ExxonMobil stock for over 10 years, according to his economic interest statements.

"So Dalton will talk a tough game on corporate compensation when pandering to the labor unions, but secretly hopes for Exxon’s windfall profits to continue in order to pad his own portfolio," writes Chris Hayes of Civitas.

Sen. Kay Hagan is co-sponsoring an amendment that would limit the pay of CEOs whose companies are receiving federal bailout money to the salary of the U.S. president.

Hagan said top executives receiving money from the bailout were receiving an average of $2.6 million in salary and bonuses, Rob Christensen reports.

"This is a slap in the face to millions of Americans who can’t understand why the same companies who sought out taxpayer dollars to bail them out were in turn paying their top executives more money than many folks will make in a lifetime," Hagan said in a statement. "It's unacceptable, it's unconscionable, and by co-sponsoring this measure, I'm joining the chorus of Americans who have said, 'Enough.'"

Hagan joined with Senators Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Tom Harkin of Iowa to sponsor the amendment to the Senate’s economic recovery package.

The president makes $400,000 per year.