"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
19 March 2007A tip of the salary capThe children get an unexpected lesson in the natural order of things:
In class today we were talking about George Washington when one of my students asked me how much the president made a year. When I told the class what he makes [$400k a year], a number of jaws hit the floor. We began talking about how much the president earns and I tried to put it in perspective for them.
I asked them to picture the 12th man on the Sacramento Kings. You know, the guy who has no chance of seeing any playing time, riding the bench the whole season. I told them that guy earns $1 million a year, more than double that of the leader of the free world. The Kings have 13 on their roster; with Maurice Taylor ($1.07 million) having been waived, the most likely "12th man" would be reserve center Vitaly Potapenko, who has played all of 9 minutes this year. He's making $3,674,584, though this is largely due to sheer longevity: Potapenko has spent ten seasons in the NBA. The classic story of this sort involves Babe Ruth, whose salary demand in 1931 was a whopping $80,000. It was pointed out to him that the President (Herbert Hoover) only drew $75,000; Ruth replied, "I had a better year than he did." And indeed, the Kings are only two games out of a playoff spot. Or you could look at it another way: Members of Congress receive $168,500 a year. This year's NBA salary cap is $53,135,000. In other words, for what it costs to stock an NBA team (few teams are actually below the cap), you could buy 315 Congressmen and have enough left over for a small party on K Street. Posted at 8:03 AM to Net Proceeds , Political Science Fiction |