Of course that means that what you get paid is the lower than the value you contribue, or at least it should be. That is how corporations make money. By paying you less than the value you contribute. If you include all secondary costs that you incur, then the difference between your contribution and your cost is what you bring in as profit for the company. The larger that difference, the more valuable you should be to the company, regardless of how much you are paid.

Of course, the public sector doesn’t try to make profit. They try to provide services for the public in an as efficient manner as possible. As salaried in the private sector go up, keeping good people working in the public sector is getting increasingly difficult. The people have to have other drivers than only salary. Sense of service or status might be some.

However, I sometimes wonder about the priorities that society shows by pay disparities. Is Judge Judy doing a job that is worth 100 time what Justice Scalia does? A US Supreme Court Justice is paid around $200,000 per year. Judge Judy gets around $20,000,000. Along the same lines, are the efforts of Rush Limbaugh worth more than 100 times than the efforts of the President of the USA? The president gets approximately $400,000 per year. Mr. Limbaugh earns about $50,000,000 per year.

I could bring up a lot of other misalignments in reward versus value, even if you look solely at the private sector. But I think it’s worth to keep in mind that the average family income in the USA is in the region of $50,000. That is for a family, not for a person. That means that the effort of 1,000 families is valued at the same level as Mr. Limbaugh.

I believe that if nothing is done about the income disparity, the country of USA will slide into a more and more dire financial situation. Let me know what you think.

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1. Doing what’s right for the country or doing what sounds right

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Here is my transcription of one question from O’Reilly and Palin’s answer:

Bill O’Reilly: Let me be very bold and fresh again. Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

Sarah Palin: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the um, the, kind of a spineless, a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite ivy league education and a fat resume that is based on anything but hard work and private sector free enterprise principles. Americans are… could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that it has to be me.

If that made sense to you, you are smarter than you look. Don’t you just hate that bold and fresh gotcha journalism that Bill O’ Reilly uses. If you don’t believe me and want to see it for yourself? Here is the episode from TheYoungTurks:

Priceless!

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