Matt Holliday a professional baseball player signed a 7 year contract worth $120 million dollars with the St. Louis Cardinals. Meanwhile, the average salary for someone with a college degree is $81,400 dollars, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It would take roughly 250 years to earn $120 million dollars with that salary. Now that doesn’t seem right to the person that worked so hard in college and has a good job. I personally do not believe millions of dollars should be going to them professional athletes. Professional athletes get way over paid.

     Now, you’re wondering what the big deal is. Well the big deal is there are people out there that are more important than athletes! Believe it or not. According to Mihir Bhagat, a senior analyst, in the article, Do Professional Athletes Get Paid Too Much Money? He stated “Professional athletes are making too much money in a society where salaries and wages are traditionally based on the value of one's work. In today's society, one should be paid according to the job’s economic importance and their value to society.” Also stated by Bhagat, Teaching is one of the most economically important occupations because our future economy relies on the education of its youth, yet teachers are paid astronomically less than the average professional athlete is. In fact, each basket Kobe Bryant scores earns him equivalent to the average classroom teacher’s yearly salary. The president, who makes critical decisions that affect the entire world every day, only makes $400,000 a year. While President Obama is hard at work trying to revive the economy, the unproven rookie in the MLB (Major League Baseball) is earning way over that number.

     Also, police officers, firefighters, and doctors save lives while risking their own lives to try to get a fraction of what sports stars make. People in the military leave their families at home to defend and protect the country knowing they may never return. It's truly a crime that none of these true heroes are given the same recognition by people as athletes such as Brett Favre or Michael Jordan are given.

     These Athletes are suppose to be roll models in our country and around the world, but they are not very good at it, this reason is they are showing kids that they can be bratty if they have a lot of money. There giving kids the ideas they can just go and be superstar athletes without the right education. When it’s a very low chance of that any way. When in fact, According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 9,380 professional athletes you have a .00565% chance of becoming a professional athlete.

     In the long run wasted money is going to professional athletes is not benefiting anyone else. Now the everyone have to spend more money for college and it’s all because of athletes. According to the Sarah Morgan in the article, 10 Things NCAA Basketball Won't Tell you, “Sports are why college is getting so expensive. At many schools, spending on sports is growing twice or three times as fast as spending on academics, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Much of the growth is due to coaching staff salaries, which account for a third of overall sports program budgets at the average university or college.”

Now, how could there be any kind of solution to this?

     There are ways that we can reduce the salary of professional athletes to stop this or resolve this problem. Likely resolution is putting a salary cap in place. A salary cap on the athletes’ salary will limit the amount of money a professional athlete can get. According to the article, Take Away the Money, “A salary cap is when each team is only allowed to spend X amount of dollars on player salaries each year. This does two things, first it makes it so players don’t get paid too much, and second it makes things fair among teams because teams like the Yankees and Dodgers for example can afford to pay out more than some smaller franchise, as a result evening out the playing field.”

     If we cut down the salary of each player in half we would have millions of dollars that can go to things useful for example; some of that money can help America get out of dept. We would need to give the money to charities and foundations. That money should be going to cure research so that we can finally find a cure for cancer, or any other major or minor disease or viruses. Also this money should go to raising the salary for teachers, police officers, firefighters, doctors, scientist, and people in the military or was in the military. According to signsofchaos, "At the highest levels, professional athletes do earn significantly more than people in other professions—an average of $3.7 million in the MBA, about $2.5 million in MLB, around $1.8 million in the NHL and about $1.3 million in the NFL. And the superstars make much more than that. Much more. Half the players in the NFL make $589,000 or less. Half in MLB make $788,000 or less. In the NHL, half made $1.1 million or less, and in the NBA, half made $2.2 million or less." If we added all of them up and split that in half we would get 7,638,500 each year, and that is not including the million dollar bonuses each player gets, and it is not including the merchandise and advertisement money.

     Why should we do anything about this you might say, this problem will eventually get heard and evolve to the point that the media will be get drawn in and Athletes will have to listen, and to the point America will act upon this situation. If America works together as a team we can resolve anything!

Links