Time for salaries to come back down
By Karl Terry: PNT columnist
Will our ailing economy finally bring salary figures back into reality?
With regular folks hit hard by the current downturn the outcry over CEO salaries has turned pretty ugly. Automaker CEOs got the message pretty quickly after each of the Big Three hopped individual private jets to Washington in order to beg for a handout a few months ago.
Other corporate bigwigs on the public dole have recently had to cancel fancy annual retreats after the collective public began looking down our noses at them. There have been layoffs and pay freezes for lots of common workers but I’m not so sure CEO pay has taken the hit it needs to experience to bring things back in line.
I had hoped Terrell Owens would be a trendsetter for professional sports salaries coming back to earth after the Dallas Cowboys released him recently because he was too much trouble and had too big a salary. Alas, fans in Buffalo are welcoming the wide receiver to the Bills organization with a $6.5 million one-year contract.
I realize football careers don’t last long and an injury can bring them to a halt prematurely but the numbers seem a little insane.
Staying with football for a minute, take for instance the Cowboys. According to a USA Today online database of pro sports salaries, Dallas paid out $146.4 million in salaries to its 53-person roster.
The median salary on the team is listed at $1.326 million. While Dallas is No. 2 in salaries in the NFL, my team, the Denver Broncos, ranks toward the bottom of the list at $95.5 million. If the whole league dropped to that level they would still be paying out salaries totaling mor than $1.5 billion.
The figure of a billion dollars has always boggled my mind, even though these days the ultra-rich commonly use that word to talk about their wealth.
Lately we’ve been talking about the national debt
closing in on $11 trillion. Now that’s a figure that is hard to get your mind around.
I’ve been told, though I can’t check it out because the $5 desk calculator I use doesn’t have nearly enough space for digits, that one way to understand that number is to go back to the time of Christ (more than 2,000 years) and start spending $1 million a day — and by 2009 you still wouldn’t have spent that much money.
Others tell me the debt we’ve achieved is equivalent to $35,000 per man, woman and child in our nation.
I don’t know if paying Terrell Owens or banking executives less salary will solve our national debt problems or not. I do know we’d all feel better about shouldering our portion if we knew T.O was juggling the figures in his bank account every month just to come up with rent like the rest of us.
Will our ailing economy finally bring salary figures back into reality?
With regular folks hit hard by the current downturn the outcry over CEO salaries has turned pretty ugly. Automaker CEOs got the message pretty quickly after each of the Big Three hopped individual private jets to Washington in order to beg for a handout a few months ago.
Other corporate bigwigs on the public dole have recently had to cancel fancy annual retreats after the collective public began looking down our noses at them. There have been layoffs and pay freezes for lots of common workers but I’m not so sure CEO pay has taken the hit it needs to experience to bring things back in line.
I had hoped Terrell Owens would be a trendsetter for professional sports salaries coming back to earth after the Dallas Cowboys released him recently because he was too much trouble and had too big a salary. Alas, fans in Buffalo are welcoming the wide receiver to the Bills organization with a $6.5 million one-year contract.
I realize football careers don’t last long and an injury can bring them to a halt prematurely but the numbers seem a little insane.
Staying with football for a minute, take for instance the Cowboys. According to a USA Today online database of pro sports salaries, Dallas paid out $146.4 million in salaries to its 53-person roster.
The median salary on the team is listed at $1.326 million. While Dallas is No. 2 in salaries in the NFL, my team, the Denver Broncos, ranks toward the bottom of the list at $95.5 million. If the whole league dropped to that level they would still be paying out salaries totaling mor than $1.5 billion.
The figure of a billion dollars has always boggled my mind, even though these days the ultra-rich commonly use that word to talk about their wealth.
Lately we’ve been talking about the national debt
closing in on $11 trillion. Now that’s a figure that is hard to get your mind around.
I’ve been told, though I can’t check it out because the $5 desk calculator I use doesn’t have nearly enough space for digits, that one way to understand that number is to go back to the time of Christ (more than 2,000 years) and start spending $1 million a day — and by 2009 you still wouldn’t have spent that much money.
Others tell me the debt we’ve achieved is equivalent to $35,000 per man, woman and child in our nation.
I don’t know if paying Terrell Owens or banking executives less salary will solve our national debt problems or not. I do know we’d all feel better about shouldering our portion if we knew T.O was juggling the figures in his bank account every month just to come up with rent like the rest of us.
posted by The Gryphon at 8:54 AM
<< Home