wakeflood
skeets, let me see if I can make an analogy work here. Haven’t thought this all the way through so I may end up tossing it out but here’ goes…
Major League Baseball. The owners of teams decided – after much wrangling – to spread the wealth around. Meaning, they pooled all the $ from national TV rights and distributed amongst all the teams – even the small market ones who needed that money to pay players to field competitive teams. They begrudgingly saw it as important to the long-term health of the entire league. BUT, as is the case when given the opportunity, a number of those small market teams pocketed that $ and didn’t bother to pay for decent players and laughed all the way to the bank. This pissed off the big market/high payroll teams, of course.
So, what did MLB do? They instituted minimum player salaries that get adjusted up over time. Yes, MLB has a minimum wage – in the paltry $450K/yr. range currently and growing almost yearly.
This means that even the miserliest owner has to cough up a certain amount of $ to field a potentially competitive team worthy of consumer’s ticket expenditure. This amounts to a salary floor.
Our current salary floor (minimum wage) for average workers is so low that the big market “teams”(read Walmart) are laughing while the taxpayers spend billions to support those folks’ ability to survive via foodstamps, emergency healthcare, etc. etc.
Which is to say that I just hijacked my own thread about corruption into a minimum wage screed! ;-)
And don’t get me started on Walmart’s virtual version of baseball’s “antitrust exemption”!