Hmmm...: I wonder how much the public is subsidizing the deal.

Immigrants: Another case of immigrants taking away jobs from Americans. Sad.

How About A Graduated Income Tax on Ichiro and Steven Schwartzman?: Ichiro is my favorite player. But does he deserve $20 million a year? $123 thousand a game? $61 thousand a hit? $24 thousand an at bat? $4 thousand a pitch? No way. (Assumptions: 162 games a year, 200 hits a season, 5 at bats a game, and 6 pitches an at bat).

Let's assume that the average guy makes $50,000 a year. Ichiro's deal gives him $20 million a year or 400 times as much as Mr. Everyman. And don't forget Steven Schwartzman, master of the private equity universe who just made about $8 billion in one year. That's 400 times Ichiro's salary and 16,000 times Mr. Everyman's.

Why we don't tax these incomes back to Earth I don't understand. They are the product of self-serving structural financial engineering, aided and abetted by government. Certainly this is capitalism at work, but so are monopolies. Unless government enforces a level playing field, "winners" use their gains to game the system to achieve future advantage which they then use to exploit the system further. Both baseball and Wall Street have done this in spades over the years. Lobbyists writing laws for legislators, unions fighting for millionaires, and legislators cutting taxes for the super rich make sure that the system grows increasingly unfair.

When the system fails miserably at creating fairness, taxation is one way of leveling the playing field. Certainly, players need to look out for their families. But please note that Mr. Everyman may work 50 years at $50,000 a year. Ichiro in one year makes enough to support 8 people for life at the Everyman level.

Supposedly, supply and demand say that Ichiro gets thet kind of money he does and that the groundskeeper and the guy selling peanuts don't. That's true as far as it goes, but there's also a an interlocking set of agreements that create the system which has nothing to do with supply and demand. Consider:

- Why does baseball make so much money? Well, first off they have a monopoly that they negotiated decades ago. Why do they deserve a monopoly when no one else does? They don't.

- Baseball also gets government subsidies for building arenas. Doe this make any sense? If we're going to do subsidies for millionaires then we should be taxing the players and the owners to get that money back. Not too bad an argument for a state income tax for anyone making over $1 million a year.

- Owners used to get the big money, but the unions fought to get their share. So Ichiro benefits from this profit-sharing agreement between millionaires. More pigs get to eat at the trough, but the pig sty is closed to everyone else.
No profit sharing for peanut vendors.

- And don't forget steroids. Obviously Ichiro isn't Barry Bonds. But a guy like Bonds or Sammy Sosa or Bret Boone received a huge salary for cheating. The extra millions made by cheaters came at the expense of players who played by the rules. These law=abiding guys ought to file a class action suit against the cheaters.

Ichiro should be taxed at around the 50% level. And Schwartzman should be taxed at the 67% level. These levels of taxation should exist to backstop the industrial gaming of our financial system that amplifies rewards for the top 1%. When hedge fund managers earning hundreds of millions get LOW 15% capital gains tax rate because they're supposedly so entrepreneurial and people who work 9-to-5 get taxed at higher rates, then something is very wrong.

Ivan Boesky said that greed is good. No it ain't. Self interest is good and is what capitalism is based on. But greed is pathological self-interest. It produces corruption and inequity. Government's role is to police business to assure integrity and fairness. When government fails, we end up with corrupt systems in which baseball players make $20 million a year.