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Michael Bérubé was commenting on David Horowitz’s belief that liberal college professors make big bucks.

After World War II my Dad stayed in the Air Force at his permanent rank of Master Sergeant, rather than his Reserve rank of Lieutenant, and was assigned to establish Air Force ROTC programs at Syracuse University, and then Colgate University. The Air Force cautioned him not to reveal his salary as he was being paid considerably more than the university faculty members and that would cause problems for the universities.

While my Dad was receiving an additional payment because the normal military facilities were not available, with three kids he got an extra job as the projectionist at the local movie theater, so I can’t imagine the level of near poverty of the faculty.

I know that my salary teaching college courses was nothing to write home about, but I was only an associate professor at a state college. I do know that the kids who took two-year degrees in computer science and went to work rather than getting their BSs started at considerably more than those of us who taught them.

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A heads up: PSoTD has escaped Blogger and is now found at: www.psotd.com.

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Mark A.R. Kleiman has a nasty, mean-spirited, low-down, totally reasonable interpretation of John Ellis’s recent actions regarding young women in the care of the state of Florida.

If Jeb-Boy doesn’t want to be treated like trash&sup1 he shouldn’t act like trash. If the sheet fits…

1. In the South “trash” has a somewhat nastier meaning than in the rest of the world. If the New York City synonym were used on South Park it would definitely be bleeped.

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When you hear people talking about money you have to watch the words that they use. One of the most important ways to “lie” about income is to convince people that “median” and “average” mean the same thing, and they most definitely do not.

If you have a company where 100 people make $10/hour, 5 people make $20/hour, one makes $40/hour, and the CEO makes $500/hour, the median income is $10/hour while the average income is $15.33/hour. Note that only seven of 107 people in the company make at least the average income.

When someone like Wal-Mart tells the world that the average salary for their company is $19,000/year, they don’t say how many of their employees actually make that much money. When the top salaries in a corporation are measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, the average can rise remarkably.

I was going to leave this as a comment over at Jo Fish’s Democratic Veteran, but his software has decided I’m a spammer if I post an extended comment.

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