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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.[/quote]

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread [b] if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. [/b]I'm sure that one will go over real well.[/quote]

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for. 
And any [i]individual[/i] being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value. [/quote]

The issue here is that private market salaries are set in an environment where there are countless different employers offering salaries independently and in pursuit of their own self interest.

If a big chunk of the non-profit industry is all being funded by the US government, there isn’t actually a functioning free market.

It is also clear that USAID wasn’t doing proper due diligence if it was awarding grants to “non profits” that were making their leadership rich while supposedly administering charity.

How could anyone pay the salaries shown in the documents posted earlier while claiming they are doing some humanitarian mission?

There are only 100 people in the company… how can you need 7 people at an average annual compensation of over $400k/year to run a 100 person nonprofit with a small budget?

At a minimum there should be rules put in place that any nonprofit receiving a grant from the US government pay no more than is allowed by the government pay scale.

This nonprofit was paying its CEO two thirds of a million dollars a year to run a 100 person entity with a $70million budget… meanwhile actual USAID senior leadership weren’t making much more than a third of that to run vastly larger entities.

[/quote]

The government makes funds available, on a competitive basis, to companies doing work the government wants done. If the government is hiring directly that's a contract and otherwise it's a grant (loosely speaking). The government's focus should be, and is, on the work that is going to be done. How the company structures itself and how it pays its staff (including from other sources of income, which most nonprofits have) are not the government's business, outside of some ethical guards that benefit the government. If they tried what you're suggesting with defense contractors you'd scream.

The people who work at nonprofits don't take a vow of poverty and there's no reason they should. [/quote]

lol at the idea that the government needs to pay a team of 7 executives nearly $3million a year to give away $70million.

Seriously, imagine how nuts that sounds to any normal person.

It is a symptom of just how broken the system is that you are making people rich while “alleviating poverty” in Africa or something… and then they run around telling people they run a “nonprofit” while paying themselves $650k/year.

It is insane…[/quote]

Just throwing it out there…if you are getting rich off aid programs for Africa you might not be the hero of this story.

[/quote]

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