Jackie - this is something that troubles me greatly as well. The idea of a baseball player (ar any other pro athlete) making tens of millions of dollars while kids go hungry is appalling. At the same time, there are lots of similar instances where the money could have been spent elsewhere and made a real, positive difference, and I am genuinely unsure where I would draw the line, and I'm sure others would draw it somewhere else entirely.

The movie Titanic cost over $100 million dollars to make, IIRC - and, for my money, it sucked. But there are other films that have made me weep with joy, or really affected my life (my partner and I basically decided to have a second kid after seeing The Straight Story, so I wouldn't wish for that film never to have been made). Should we look at making movies in the same way as you look at professional sports? That they shouldn't happen until everyone is out of poverty?

I definitely agree that the egregious example of pro sports salaries seems like an easy thing to target and say "Let's spend that money on our schools" or something like that. (But I also happen not to enjoy pro sports, so it would be no sacrifice for me.) But there are also smaller, more widespread things out there to look at in the same way - if every American for the next ten years decided that rather than getting a newer, bigger TV/DVD player/SUV, etc., they'd somehow use the money to improve the lot of those less fortunate, it would make a vast difference (networks and advertisers would hate it, of course).

I fear I'm coming across as a devil's advocate, a position I hate taking, as I often feel it's just an excuse to be an a**hole - I guess I'm saying I agree with you, that the priorities represented by paying ball players millions while leaving people in suffering are pretty warped, but we're choosing to sacrifice something we don't care about. Others may have a different view of this.

I'm off to increase the caffeine levels in my blood, so I can take another look at this post and see if I made any sense at all.