After a brief hiatus during the recession, richly paid CEOs are back at it, booking gargantuan pay hikes.

Exhibit A: The 200 highest-paid CEOs saw their pay go up 16% last year, to a median of $15 million.

And the average American? Not so much. Median household income went up a mere .25% to $52,971.

In short, assuming a 60-hour workweek and two weeks’ vacation, the typical CEO at a large company made more in 11 hours than the typical family made all year. The average CEO made $5,000 an hour, or 283 times the typical family’s earnings.

Lawrence Ellison of Oracle (ORCL) — a perennial heavyweight on the highest-paid CEO list — topped the chart by outdoing even himself. He netted a 24% pay hike to take $96 million, even though he was already worth tens of billions.

Leslie Moonves at CBS (CBS), David Zaslav at Discovery Communications (DISCA) and Robert Iger atWalt Disney (DIS) all placed among the highest paid, with colossal compensation of from $37 million to $60 million, according to Equilar, an independent executive pay compensation analysis company.

As usual, much of the pay came in the form of generous dollops of stock and options — often without any real performance hurdles, even though this kind of pay is supposed to serve as an incentive. “Boards are just throwing stock at CEOs, without thinking about the consequences,” says Eleanor Bloxham of the Corporate Governance Alliance, a CEO pay consultancy.

But does excessive pay CEO really matter? Yes, for several reasons. It’s often a red flag that board members are mere CEO lapdogs — not great news for investors who need boards to nudge top managers to perform for them. Second, excessive CEO pay can signal that a company has an “imperial CEO” and that it’s doing too little to groom its next leader, which makes for poor succession planning.

Big picture, there’s also the issue of whether widening pay gaps and the increasingly stratified class structure in the United States is eroding the historically egalitarian underpinnings of U.S. capitalism — and thus demoralizing the workforce.

We haven’t heard much from Occupy Wall Street lately, right? But with 16% pay hikes at the top while the typical American family is forced to eat a pay cut in real wages, after inflation, it’s a good bet that the sense of unfairness tapped by the Occupy protests still festers just below the surface.

Click through this slide show, published July 16, for a closer look at 10 CEOs with some of the nation’s largest pay packages. Included all seven chief executives with the richest compensation packages last year, as well as three others who are leaders in various pay categories. Each has a deal that’s worth noting.

Marc Benioff, salesforce.com: $22 million

Salesforce.com (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff’s compensation ranks him 32nd for pay. But he makes our top 10 list for another reason: He received more than any other chief executive last year in gains on stock options ($106.3 million, compared with a median of $2.3 million). These gains are excluded from Benioff’s annual pay numbers.

Benioff also got a 25% pay hike, most of which was in the form of an $18.9 million options grant. That seems like a lot, given that he already had a huge $1.8 billion stake (stock and options value) in the company.

But it’s tough to criticize the pay here too much, for two reasons. First, his pay package uses rigorous performance metrics that serve as good incentive, says Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which analyzes proxy filings for investors. And, next, it seems to be working. Benioff, who co-founded salesforce.com, has helped investors make a ton of money. At more than $42, the stock is up eightfold from $5 in 2005.

• Bing: The latest on Occupy Wall Street

Howard Schultz, Starbucks: $28.9 million

The next time you’re in a Starbucks, be sure to tip your barista well, even if you just paid an arm and a leg for the coffee. After all, that barista is making only $19,000 a year, or just less than $9 an hour, according to estimates by PayScale.

So where the heck do all your coffee dollars go?

A disturbingly large amount goes straight to the guy at the top, CEO Howard Schultz. Why is this troubling? Well, first, he’s already rich, since his stock and options in Starbucks (SBUX) are worth well over $1 billion.

Schultz received an 80% pay hike in 2012, which put his compensation for the year at $28.9 million. That ranks him 14th for CEO pay overall. We put him on our top 10 list because he got the highest deferred compensation (income deferred for tax reasons), of $172.6 million. Schultz’s take here stems from 1992 options he exercised in 1997.

Next, it makes little sense that Schultz still gets huge stock grants ($18 million last year) and options awards ($6.9 million), given his huge exposure to the stock already. He owns nearly 4% of the company’s stock. At the end of last year, his overall Starbucks stock and options were worth $1.28 billion. Do you really think that giving him more stock and options will incentivize him more? “It’s hardly the best use of company stock,” says Paul Hodgson, an executive pay expert with BHJ Partners, a corporate governance consulting firm.

Starbucks responds that his high pay is explained by “the unique value of his leadership to Starbucks,” which is a good point, in a way. When he returned as CEO in 2008, Starbucks stock was at around $18 per share. It’s now around $69.50.

• Bing: Coffee shop etiquette