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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (31637)	10/10/2001 7:56:57 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

She has a college degree and a Masters degree, anybody who has spent one hour trying to keep a birthday part of ten seven year olds under control for an hour can't imagine doing that for 21 kids all day long, let alone teach them something at the same time. And you know what she's paid. And they you look at some kid who barely graduated high school but can hit a curve ball and is making a 4 million dollar bonus plus 3 million a year. And these are our society's priorities?? The discrepancy in salary between your wife and the kid who hits curve balls is not caused by society's priorities. The values of various sorts of labor are not set by decisions about relative importance of work. They are set by supply and demand. It just so happens that there are relatively few people who can hit curve balls well, and a lot of people who are willing to pay money to watch someone hit curve balls well. I don't think very many of these people think baseball is more important than education. When taxes devoted to education are factored in, any but the most fanatic of baseball fans puts far more money into education than into baseball. Money spent on education is simply spread among a much larger number of recipients. There would be two ways to bring your wife up to the $7 million level. One would be to spread the cost among the 21 students that are the direct beneficiaries. That would come to something over $300,000 per student, which might be thought a bit steep. Spread this over schools in general, and we would have a lot of people who want to be teachers, but very few who could afford to be educated. I really don't think it would work very well. The other way would be to spread the cost among the taxpayers. Would you like that? I didn't think so. There are a lot of reasons why our kids are screwed up (to the extent that they are: I recall that when my generation was young, people thought we were pretty screwed up). The money earned by athletes and entertainers is not among those reasons.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (31637)	10/10/2001 11:58:01 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

And they you look at some kid who barely graduated high school but can hit a curve ball and is making a 4 million dollar bonus plus 3 million a year. And these are our society's priorities?? No wonder our kids are so screwed up. Someone's pay has little or nothing to do with society's priorities. It has to do with supply and demand. I think there are less then a thousand major league baseball players. Out of that group there are even fewer who make $3mil a year or more. So that "kid who can hit a curve ball" might be in the top hundred in the world at what he does. And his job is such that differences in talent can be fairly clear and are important to the organization that he works for. Another factor is that he can entertain many people at the same time. Even if you wife is one of the top hundred in the world at what she does she can't teach a million kids simultaneously. If she was going to get paid as much as the baseball player, she would have to bankrupt the parents of all of the kids she teaches and that still probably would not be enough. Tim