Are Professional Athletes Overpaid?

         People can not argue with the fact that most professional athletes are exponentially overpaid. I mean in some cases the athlete is deserving of a decent paycheck, but when you have LeBron James making $53 million dollars to throw a ball in a hoop while you have neurosurgeons making on average $474,500 when they are saving lives everyday, I see something very wrong with that picture. In Are Professional Athletes Really Overpaid? The Answer Might Surprise You, Steve Resnick states, "Lebron James, Manny Ramirez, Kobe Bryant, CC Sabathia, Alex Rodriguez, etc...sign huge contracts for over $20 million per season." Those figures just blow my mind, they just go out and pretty much do nothing while the people that are saving lives everyday such as police and firefighter's are in the 5 figure range.Most people think that athletes deserve what they are earning, which i mean in only one case is where I would maybe agree with that; when you have football players that are getting charged at by 250 pound men at about 17 mph, its likely that you are going to get tackled the wrong way and possibly give yourself brain damage or maybe even paralysis.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/2447836454/">Keith Allison</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photo pin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

         In Athlete are Overpaid and Selfish Matt Lefebure says, "Major League Baseball may be responsible for the rising salaries of athletes. If all 30 teams’ salaries were combined, the total price tag of every big league player would be in excess of $2.02 billion. That translates to $67.6 million per team, and $2.7 million per player. There are currently 41 players in the majors who make more than $10 million per year. One of these 41 players, Alex Rodriguez is the highest paid athlete in the world; he makes $22 million a year." The total is astounding being that all that extra money that we are practically wasting on athletes we  could put that towards the national debt. So all in all we have come to the conclusion that athletes are overpaid and we should find a better way to use the money by either putting it towards our country or paying the people that actually do something to help society.