Wednesday, June 01, 2005
The A-Rod Principle
This story by Dennis Cauchon in USAToday is horrifically confused. He tries to be fair to both sides of the Social Security issue by hopelessly muddling both arguments. He creates an opening for discussing abolishing or raising the SSI tax cap, but then turns around and uses all the Bush White House cooked-books financial data. So, the article's a mess.0 comments
However, he does bring up an important point, which is doggedly not covered in the corporate mainstream press:
The A-Rod Principle.
Alex Rodriguez of The New York Yankees is currently pulling down $25 million yearly for our ability to boo him for kicking ground balls around third base; Tiger Woods is estimated to be earning $80 million.
The Yankees are paying pitchers Buddy Groom and Chien-Ming Wang, and fielders Robinson Cano and Russ Johnson in the paltry area of under $500,000 a year to sit at the end of the bench or hold down the fort while higher-priced players nurse mostly faked injuries. The ancient, washed-up infielder Rey Sanchez is pulling down a cool $600,000 this year from George Steinbrenner to provide an out if the Yanks are scoring too many runs.
My beloved New York Mets are paying sore-armed pitcher Bartolome Fortunato $317,000 sit at the bottom of both their payroll and their plans for 2005.
The Yankees started the season with 18 players on their roster who were making $3,000,000/yr. or more. The Mets had 11 players in that category. Spread that over 30 teams. Multiply that by four major sports, plus tennis, golf, horse racing and NASCAR. Multiple all that times all the high salaries of professional sports administration, agents, announcers of all those events, their broadcast teams and their networks and cable companies, all those newspapers and writers and pundits, and pre- and post-game shows, and you have a picture of thousands of extremely well-paid people.
But not you.
And all those people with their above-six-figure salaries, plus bonuses and/or endorsements pay Social Security taxes on only the first $90,000 into their bulging bank accounts.
You and I pay those taxes on every last nickel.
posted by Gotham 3:03 PM
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