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Isn't money worth anylthing anymore?
?Do you remember the old axiom: “Look after the pennies and the dollars will look after themselves”?
As columnist Harry Stemp observes on page 7, it appears that governments no longer have any concept of a dollar, let alone a penny. Wasting a few hundred thousand dollars means nothing to them. It’s obscene, it’s criminal, but nobody in the bureaucracy seems to care. And they’re not the only ones.
It was reported last week that Tiger Woods is the first person in the sports world to have amassed a billion dollars. A thousand million dollars. That too is obscene. The man plays a game, for Pete’s sake. He plays it well, mind you, better than anyone else does, while there are a number of people on the Toronto Maple Leafs who apparently play their game poorly, and still pull in several million dollars a year.
But these people entertain us, their agents will argue. These are the people we watch on TV, and the sponsors of the TV commercials pay millions upon millions, so why shouldn’t their clients (and they themselves) get their share of those revenues? Well, we would counter, perhaps if the salaries of baseball players or television actors weren’t so insanely high, the price of going to a baseball game would still be within reach of the kid who would really enjoy it, and perhaps the consumer products on those TV commercials wouldn’t be outlandishly high either.
What’s even more obscene, though, is that the salary of an over-rated goalie on a hopeless hockey team is not just double or triple that of the men and women - the firefighters, the police or soldiers - who risk their lives for us every day, or those, like the teachers, to whom we entrust the education and safety of our children. It’s 50 times or more what we pay those people. When you stop and think about it, it makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s totally unjustifiable in any kind of moral and just society. But we do nothing to stop it. We accept it.
Any society has a gap between its rich members and its poor members, even the most progressive countries don’t seem to make a measurable impact on curing that basic inequity. But it seems in the last few decades in North America, the gap has become even more horrific, and the deciding who’s rich and who’s poor is nonsensical, even insane. Why should an “athlete” with a history of cheating and drug use make 40 times the money that the President of the United States does? The mind boggles at such a concept.
In every organization on earth, every corporation large or small, every government department at every level, there are people whose job description is to closely monitor the spending of the shareholders’ or taxpayers’ money. These people are supposed to be looking after the pennies so the dollars will look after themselves, they’re supposed to be reporting regularly to us on where things might be going wrong, they’re the ones who are supposed to help us avoid the kind of overspending that seems rampant in the world, and avoid the obscene abuse of our money. We don’t seem to be able to trust these people any more. Maybe we’re not letting them do their jobs.
Or maybe we’re just not paying them enough.
