Your manager should make more - because nobody should be a manager of software devs who is not a software developer himself and should be able to command more than a young engineer.

You shouldn't get to be an officer unless you were first enlisted.

One possible approach to this problem is to separate day-to-day management from staff budget/pay negotiations. If you're employing line managers who are worth only $90k a year and have the attitude you describe, someone else needs to be making those staffing decisions. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't be employing those line managers, but you need to think carefully about the nature of the role. The traditional all-in-one hierarchy probably isn't appropriate in that situation.

Managers should rarely have sole power over the people hired on their team, for exactly that reason. It's easy to fall into "empire building" mode, and you want checks and balances for that.

Salary envy is just a minor side problem of that approach. One of the bigger issue is that bad managers surround themselves with yes people, compounding any possible damage.