BACK • 
As The World Turns
If you’re wondering what’s wrong with the world we live in today, I offer up what follows as a great example: there was a class action lawsuit filed back in 1997 on behalf of fans who were required to buy a full season of games on the NFL Direct TV ticket satellite package. The suit was brought by two individuals on behalf of everyone else, to try to force the NFL to sell these game tickets on a week-by-week basis rather than forcing people to buy an entire season on an all or none basis.
The first thing that occurs to me is, since when doesn’t someone have the right in this country to sell their product in whatever manner they want? Let’s go back to the NFL, because whether the NFL sells their package as a season or on a week-by-week basis matters little to me. It won’t effect the world very much. But here’s what will effect the world, and one of things that’s very, very wrong with it. Under the agreement coming from the class action suit, subscribers can now purchase individual weeks for $29.99 each for the next two years. Okay, and so what? The agreement cost the NFL about $13 million in payments to subscribers, LEGAL FEES, and administrative cost.
Finally, we come to the punch line; the two original plaintiffs in the lawsuit, were paid $1,000 each. Other subscribers will get somewhere between $8.33 and $20.83 in individual payments. Now, are you ready? THE LAWYERS WHO ENGINEERED THIS CLASS ACTION SUIT WILL GET 3.7 MILLION DOLLARS FOR THEIR EFFORTS. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is way, way, wrong with the world today.
Everybody is suing everybody for everything. Nobody wants to be held responsible for anything, and the lawyers of this world are making out like bandits.
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Speaking of money, and somebody who is not making out like a bandit, do you have any idea how much Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan makes a year? I ran across the figure quite by accident, and it is, "only" $161, 239.00. Now, you may rightly observe that the word "only" in quotation marks probably shouldn’t come before a salary of $161, 239.00, but then again, consider who we’re talking about. Without a doubt, Greenspan is one of the most powerful men in the world. He not only leads the Federal Reserve Board, but he pretty much gets his ways most of the time. So never mind the fact that Greenspan doesn’t make any where near what a baseball player or a rock star would make, how foolish of me to think him that important. But in many cases, he doesn’t even make as much as his associates! Specifically, William McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, makes $283, 300 a year, which is less than the $303,000 made by Robert Perry, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Go figure.
My favorite Fed salary story involves Greenspan’s predecessor, Paul Volker. When Volker left the Fed in 1987, he was making a little over $100,000. He was almost immediately hired by a major Wall Street brokerage firm-- for $850,000!! That, apparently, back in ’87 was the differential between Fed pay and what somebody in the real competitive world was willing to pay a man like Volker. Is there any doubt that someone like Greenspan could make many millions of dollars a year if he went into private employment and left the government? The point of this is simply that while I hate to see the government spend our taxes foolishly, we really do have to pay our officials more if we’re to attract the best people. Otherwise, all we’ll get is very rich people or people who aren’t capable of making it big in the private world. That opinion goes for Congress as well. How many Congressmen are millionaires? Quite a few. Why do we have such a problem with campaign financing? We have the problem because those that aren’t millionaires have to raise all that money to win the election. I really think we ought to pay all the Senators and all the Congressmen a million dollars a piece and then not let them accept a campaign contribution over a hundred bucks! Seems to me that in most cases you’d get some independent people rather than those who are always beholden to outside interests.
(Tom Butenhoff is a First Vice President with J. E. Liss and Company, Inc.
in Milwaukee. The views are his, and not necessarily those of Liss
Financial Services or the Job Connection/Hiring
Network.)