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.

A bill filed today would give victims of the state's sterilization program $20,000 each.

The legislation, filed by four House Democrats, would make one-time cash payments to the estimated 2,000 to 2,800 North Carolinians sterilized by a state eugenics program that ran from 1929 through the 1970s.

The total cost could be between $40 and $56 million.

Rep. Larry Womble, a Winston-Salem Democrat and one of the primary sponsors, said that he expects a lot of resistance from legislators worried about the state's potential $2 billion shortfall. But he said compensation is the right thing to do.

"The state committed a wrong against innocent people," he said. "This was worse than Nazi Germany."

A working committee came up with the figure on its own, since it could not find any similar compensation efforts to model. Womble said that he considers it far too low, but it was the best they could do.

"There is no amount of money that can restore their dignity or replace what the state took away from them," he said. "Their bloodline has been cut. They cannot continue their family name because the state did this horrific thing to the insides of their bodies."