The total compensation of the best-paid (salary and bonus excluding stock options) chief executive on our most recent CEO Compensation list, Bob R. Simpson of XTO Energy, was $32.2 million last year, 223 times as much as the average chief executive. And then there was Apple’s Steven P. Jobs, who earned a nominal $1 salary — but, thanks to stock options, earned $646.6 million last year.”

Trust me that most of my friends of similar pedigree in business or law are doing better than I and are much more adept at minimizing taxes and receiving non-cash compensation. The story of the $1 salary above says it all. And who cares what your earned income is when half of that goes to the government? Wealth is not largely acquired from salary and regular wages. Earning money taxable at marginal rates is a paupers play and business execs know it. Smart people have low salaries and large options or deferred compensation schemes with lots of perks. Why doesn’t someone normalize salaries to a 40 hour workweek with time and a half for overtime? Then physicians would probably be shown to make the 60 or 75k they really earn.

“According to Hyatt and Stockton (p. 8), Flexner sought to shrink the number of medical schools in the USA to 31, and to cut the annual number of medical graduates from 4400 to 2000. A majority of American institutions granting M.D. or D.O. degrees as of the date of the Report (1910) closed within 2-3 decades. (No Canadian medical school was deemed inadequate, and none closed or merged subsequent to the Report.) In 1904, there were 160 M.D. granting institutions with more than 28000 students. By 1920, there were only 85 M.D. granting institution, educating only 13,800 students. By 1935, there were only 66 medical schools operating in the USA.

Between 1910 and 1935, more than half of all American medical schools merged or closed. This dramatic decline was in some part due to the implementation of the Report’s recommendation that all “proprietary” schools be closed, and that medical schools should henceforth all be connected to universities. Of the 66 surviving M.D. granting institutions in 1935, 57 were part of a university. An important factor driving the mergers and closures of medical schools was that all state medical boards gradually adopted and enforced the Report’s recommendations.”

Killing the supply of those that can legally perform the services.

You don’t think lawyers and engineers have student loans? Don’t have after hours non-billable work?

What “parents” want their children to marry is the most laughable example. They want them to marry rich people, of course. But if they don’t know any, a doctor will do.

And counting “lawyers” as a single group while dividing medical professionals by specialty makes me wonder about who ginned up that list.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19058407/

“When we first looked at America’s best- and worst-paying jobs a year back, we asked the question, “Why do financially pushy parents want their children to marry doctors?” Our answer then: Because, as Willie Sutton said of banks, that is where the money is. Still is.

The medical profession continues to dominate the top end of our list of the 25 best- and worst-paying jobs in America. Anesthesiologists have flipped places with surgeons to take the top spot, but the next eight places are firmly in the healing hands of various sorts of specialist practitioners.

Chief executives, at No. 10, and airline pilots, at No. 14, are the only two non-medical occupations in the top 15. Even lawyers don’t make it. They’re No. 16.”

Nor does tort reform in most of its current guises.