Call it the A-Rod tax.
One in three Americans believe the government should make it illegal to pay athletes and movie stars more than $1 million per year, according to a new poll.
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released Thursday found that 30 percent favor government pay limits for jocks and film stars.
so says the NY Post per a recent Rasmussen poll. This is seriously why I'd rather stay in the basement all day, if I step outside and run into 10 people on the street I'd risk meeting 3 people who think like this >:(
almost 3 years ago
iamawesomer
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So, uh, the owners will become insanely richer? Brilliant.
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
it only makes sense
if you force the leagues to lower ticket prices.
But then I’ll have to sit next to these people when I go to games. Bleh.
- So, to ease his pain, you're supposed to take him to a ball game?
- Yes.
Even then it doesn't make sense
’cause all that would do is make it impossible to get tickets at face value
Clearly we should force the teams to give tickets away, and forbid their resale, so no one can make any money off of this.
/sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious
Brewers Baseball and other assorted nonsense (mostly the assorted nonsense) at my blog, What's a Tararrel?
100% of the people who make up that 33%
are very dumb.
This is America people, not China. You are free to accept money that others are willing to pay you for a job.
I'm guessing they think the money will go back to into the pockets of lower and middle class people.
Except it doesn’t. Any economics experts want to point out something obvious I’m missing here?
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
by Sky Kalkman on Mar 31, 2009 10:48 PM EDT up reply actions
As a pseudo-economics expert
Perhaps we’re underestimating these people. Perhaps they want the ban on salaries to be accompanied by a price ceiling on ticket prices…so that they can snatch up all the undervalued tickets and resell them for huge profit.
I know that if that ever happens, I’m definitely going into the ticket scalping business.
Brewers Baseball and other assorted nonsense (mostly the assorted nonsense) at my blog, What's a Tararrel?
Dese hot deng baseber playurs got it made
Hitting a god deng stick against a circle figur them thur and getting payd over 20 bucks an our? Well butter me up and call me biskit
by NittanyCub on Mar 31, 2009 10:55 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs
people are idiots
i guarantee this is just because people think they would get more money in their own hands as a result and/or believe ticket prices would be lower. people don’t really think when they respond to polls. i saw one a couple months ago where people were asked a poll that included 3 questions. (1) Should the government raise spending to pull us out of a recession? About 2/3 said yes. (2) Should the government cut taxes to pull us out of a recession? About 2/3 said yes. (3) Should the government make sure to balance the budget despite the recession? About 2/3 said yes. People don’t know what any of these questions mean or what anything economic means at all? You throw a question in a poll like that out, and people think it’s smart when they hear it. If you start them with a primer on how the money will all go to the owners, then ask them, they’ll all be against it. If you tell them that the owners donate more of their incomes to charity, they’ll be for it. You prep a question the right way, you get the answer you want.
by Matt Swartz on Mar 31, 2009 11:32 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs
+1
"If Bowden was a general contractor, he'd build houses with nine bedrooms, six garages, no bathrooms, and half a roof."
by DyeLongJustice on Apr 1, 2009 10:14 AM EDT up reply actions
You're probably mostly right
But I have to wonder if some of it is revenge/outrage-type thinking? I mean, just look at the AIG crap. “OMG that’s too much money! They don’t need it anyway, especially in these tough economic times. It’s not like ballplayers deserve big salaries, it’s just the evil capitalist markets determining that they are worth that much.” (Because as we all know, polls and government bureaucrats are way better suited to determine what people should make than free markets)
I agree
I sometimes wince when I see the amount of money that players sign for these days. As early as last off season, even mediocre players like Carlos Silva and Jeff Suppan, were getting huge money. Obviously a 1 million dollar limit is retarded, but I do think that there should be some regulation of salaries.
vivaelbeñsheets
I do agree that Silva and Suppan should have a 1 million dollar limit.
by juggernaut400 on Apr 1, 2009 9:48 PM EDT up reply actions
This is why I don't believe in "populism"
"I just wish that the late Harry Caray were still around so I could hear him mispronounce 'Kosuke Fukudome' every fukun' night" -- Dennis Miller
If there was a $1M cap...
Presumably those player salready making $1M or more would continue to make exactly $1M.
The lahman database had 14.33 players per team making $1M+ in 2008; the average player making less than $1M made $470k. So, if we fill out the 25-man at $470k per and tack on $1M total for 15 more players to fill out the 40-man, then I get an average payroll of $20.3M [$14.3M+$5M+$1M]. The league average 40-man last year was about $90.3M, which means the $1M cap would take $2.1B from the players and hand it to the owners.
If ownership was required to pass all of that along in lower ticket prices, the average ticket price would drop by nearly $27 per ticket… I guess there would be alot of cheap tickets :)
Granted, they could split it up a bit— profit less on the RSNs to lower everyones cable bill alittle, fair concession pricing, cheaper licensed clothing…?
I'm guessing that if we see the actual questions from the poll
then there’s a chance that it’s something like ‘do you think that a million dollars is too much for someone to earn for playing sport’, or something like that.
ask them if they want the government to step in and limit the amount, and you’ll get a different answer.
maybe i’m being too cynical, but that whole article is just an excercise in SEO
what have i got myself into this time... http://damiansthirtyyearchallenge.blogspot.com/
by alea iacta est on Apr 1, 2009 12:14 AM EDT reply actions
I wouldn't be surprised
this is the NY Post after all
Can't get enough of the Oakland A's? Visit Oaktown Awesomer's. For further statistical analysis, Beyond the Box Score.
One other thing...
I was browsing through some 1800’s baseball related newspaper articles in the NY Times archives and found that in 1880s the max salary for players was set in tiers; A league official would place each player into one of five classes and whichever class you were in you could not earn more than the max for the class [max also set by the league].
The players’ union would NEVER allow anything as strict as described in this thread, but how about tiered maximums that really just stop teams from being able to overpay crummy players?
why would we want that?
In my opinion, owners should have the freedom to screw up as bad as they want. If the Steinbrenners decide they need more depth at second and call up Ray Durham’s agent tomorrow morning and offer him 3 years and $33 million, that is their right. And it’ would be funny as hell, so I like the possibility of it happening.
Beyond that, a max-salary system would just take money from the players and give them to owners. Putting aside issues of economic justice, I simply prefer the idea of my money going towards the athletes who actually entertain me, rather than towards the old guys who extort money from taxpayers and routinely try to screw me over.
Athletes are paid – on the whole – roughly what they are worth. They provide an entertainment service that few people can replicate, and that entertainment is worth quite a lot of money. If people don’t like the idea of athletes/movie stars/singers/whatever making boat-loads of cash, then they shouldn’t value entertainment so highly. Salary caps do nothing to change the overall value of the market, nor do they change the factors that determine pricing.
I agree!
Look at Willie Bloomquist; he makes $1.5 million! That screams “highly overpaid athlete”!
Seriously, though, the government needs to keep its shit out of profitable businesses. But then again, the U.S. Government has protected the MLB cartel all these years, so…
I think MLB teams proved this off-season that they understand how to adjust to the economic downturn. We don’t need any government intervention.
Don't forget that MLB is essentially a federally-protected monopoly.
The government is already very involved in its doings because of its anti-trust exemption. Saying that the government has no right to step in here is akin to saying that the government has no right to tell AIG not to give taxpayer bailout money in bonuses.
I don’t really need to see baseball players netting 15 million dollars after taxes per year (before advertisements, investments, blah blah blah). Should it be against the law? Of course not, but I would not be against the government raising taxes on the richest folks in “pure-entertainment” industries, which would include not only the performers (players), but also the owners as well.
"The NY Mets are my favorite squadron" -- Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Um
I think there might be constitutional problems with the government intervening and nulling a contract. That was part of the AIG thing that didn’t get enough attention. But even if I’m wrong about that, the main AIG issue was that the gov’t was totally OK with the bonuses and then did some heinously unconstitutional stuff to cover its own ass when people got upset about it.
by mattybobo on Apr 1, 2009 11:01 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
my point isn't that government acted rightly
it’s that the government gives MLB certain freedoms and because of that it should have certain liberties that it can take with MLB where it maybe could not take those freedoms otherwise.
the AIG thing is not that the government was acting in our best interests, it’s that it should be able to do so.
"The NY Mets are my favorite squadron" -- Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Sorry I misunderstood your original point
Also I never really knew much about the whole sports league anti-trust thing, so thanks for bringing it up. That is an interesting angle.
yep, no worries.
by the way, what salary should the commissioner of baseball be getting? Is 18M too high?
"The NY Mets are my favorite squadron" -- Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Maybe 33% of people are Royals fans.
by Stylus Happenstance on Apr 1, 2009 4:39 PM EDT reply actions
Really
Some people are not terribly thrilled by a small group of athletes making more money than anyone could ever possibly need, just by hitting a genetic jackpot?
Shocking. Shocking, I tell you. These people should be rounded up and shot. They have offended the God of free markets.
Many years from now, when his name's recalled
Everyone will say, "He should have passed the ball"
-- Al Stewart, "Football Hero"
Not sure which points you're making, but it's not just winning the genetic jackpot. It's winning it in something that the population highly value.
If we weren’t so enthralled with watching pro sports, the money wouldn’t be there.
Beyond the Boxscore // Calling BJ Upton lazy is lazy.
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