Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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The biggest pay imbalance ratios in the US are in professional sports.

The top 30 NBA players are earning a combined $1 billion per year in salary.

122 players in Major League Baseball are presently earning $10 million per year or more.

The NBA + MLB + NFL is around $14 billion per year in salary for the top 2,000 active players. Probably $200 billion in salary over the next ten years.

It's more than what the top 2,000 executives are extracting from corporations in the US.

I can't wait to see what the Lakers, Clippers, Kings, Warriors, Rams, Chargers, 49ers, Dodgers, Giants, Athletics and Angels look like after California makes things right.

Lebron James should only be allowed to earn a maximum of ten times what a janitor in the stadium earns or a secretary in the front office, were California to be consistent.

Oh wait, they won't do anything about that extreme inequality because no professional athlete would want to play for a California team ever again?

I’m not sure how comparable a professional athlete is to a CEO.

CEOs exist to help a company sell more product, while in sports the athlete IS the product. In that respect they have more in common with movie stars than with CEOs.

Which I suppose just raises the question of the rule applying to movie studios—a similarly unlikely scenario—and how CA can defend the inconsistency. Is there a loophole for sports/film in that the famous people are contractors and not employees? I don’t know if that’s even the case, just ruminating.

> I’m not sure how comparable a professional athlete is to a CEO.

I agree that this is a difficult question. But why in the world is the government, with all it's perverse incentives, trying to figure this out? The shareholders, the people with a literal financial stake in the outcome, have spoken. Good CEOs are worth their weight in gold. Actually, gold isn't valuable enough. Steve Ballmer's resignation immediately added $20 billion to Microsoft's market cap. That's worth about 400,000 kilograms of gold.

You want to limit professional athlete salaries? Cool, the teams will save a whole lot of money, their owners will be real happy.

> You want to limit professional athlete salaries?

Of course I never said that, you did.

I'm very clearly pointing out the hypocrisy of California and its regressive, anti-human policies in action.

If they weren't hypocrites, they'd similarly cap athlete salaries based on the lowest paid employees of the team the athlete plays for - given the extreme pay imbalances in question. I believe the state officials proposing this are cowards and going after easy populist targets, so they'll never dare to act consistently and target athlete pay for exactly the same reason as executive pay.

Citizens can hardly run away from California any faster. It's so bad they're set to begin losing congressional seats for the first time in their history.

> Citizens can hardly run away from California any faster. It's so bad they're set to begin losing congressional seats for the first time in their history.

Liberal California may be losing population to conservative states like Texas, but conservative states like Texas are becoming far more liberal.

> I believe the state officials proposing this are cowards and going after easy populist targets, so they'll never dare to act consistently and target athlete pay for exactly the same reason as executive pay.

The reason is that executives decide other employees pay; the rule doesn't cap highest-paid-employee pay but executive pay. Higher paid athletes don't set the salaries of lower paid athletes.

Is that why California’s population actually went up by 2 million ? The people leaving CA myth is more nuanced. There is domestic out migration of poorer and conservative population, which is replaced by higher income international migration. That story never seems to be told because it doesn’t jive with the narrative ?

> More people are leaving California than moving in, evidence of the toll the state’s housing crisis is taking as the world’s fifth largest economy inches toward 40 million people. [1]

What is the myth again?

[1] https://ktla.com/2019/12/20/californias-population-stalls-at...

The myth is that there is overall net out migration. But the reality is that California's population is actually growing and there is net migration into the state. There is net domestic migration out of the state, which is more than offset by positive international migration into the state.

Even within domestic migration - people leaving are poorer and people coming over are richer and wealthier.

The "exodus" stories are often peddled to tell a story on how productive people are leaving and there will be no tax revenues. But the opposite is actually true.

So, to summarize - 1) Net migration to CA is positive and 2) Net migration is actually bringing in more high income folks

https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-population-migr...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-income-t...

> The top 30 NBA players are earning a combined $1 billion per year in salary.

Saving this one for the next time I hear some canard about unions preventing top performers from their deserved compensation.

The Screen Actors' Guild might be a better example here.

That still happens. The top 5 players make $30m-$40m, but they’d probably make closer to $50m+ in an open market. After all, the best players still get multiple teams trying to get them on max contracts.

The current effect of the cap is mostly to redistribute some of that money to top 10-30 players who also get max contracts even as everyone knows they are not quite as good.

There are also competitiveness reasons to avoid true maxes like parity between the teams of relatively rich and poor/thrifty owners. But yeah the union does depress the salaries of the very best.

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