In today's society, one will be paid more if their job is more economically important.

However, teaching is one of the most economically important occupations because our future economy relies on the education of its youth, yet teachers are paid much less than the average professional athlete.

Professional athletes do not play near as vital role in the economy as the president, but their salaries reflect otherwise. These games are supposed to be played for fun, not for millions of dollars.

Many people believe athletes are being paid for little work, but in fact they work harder than any one else. Not only do they work during their particular season; they also work in the off season. Most professional athletes train on their own striving to become better. They also attend miniature camps and their seasonal training camps. These athletes work year round to earn their high salaries.  

Making it into the pros isn't an easy thing to do. It takes a tremendous number of hours of hard work and dedication every day to earn a job in professional sports. These athletes sometimes go through life threatening injuries for the love of the game. Considering this, one might think that these athletes do it for the love of the game not for the money. According to Gerald Sim, "The odds are higher for someone to become a brain surgeon than a NBA player,

According to Chris Butterfield, it is the fan's fault these athletes make the money they do.

A team of average players whose combined salaries were less than the personal salary of Albert Belle of the Chicago White Sox ("Professional Athletes...").

enough money. Once they have gotten a whiff of the riches they will do anything to get more, even if it means going somewhere else to play (Turner).

Once an athlete signs a high dollar contract he is expected to play like a high dollar athlete. When an athlete has a bad day, the fans and sports writers let them know about it ("Professional AthletesÉ").

252 million dollars over a span of 10 years. This is enough money to feed the nation's poor for a year or to provide a lot more housing and shelters for the homeless. Others could benefit from the millions being wasted on these athletes.

And it is sort of disheartening to see a ballplayers make the kind of salary they do when a teacher doesn’t make what they really deserve.”

He says his staff of 40 people crunches numbers with a multimillion dollar database that teams just don't have.

When Oakland A’s pitching ace Barry Sito went across the bay to the San Francisco giants for $126 million; when Red Sox idol Johnny Damon left for the hated New York Yankees for $52 million; when the Red Sox signed Japanese pitching star Daisuke Matsuzaka for $52 million — those were all Scott Boras deals.

250 million over 10 years

But for most of Major League Baseball’s history, players were paid a small fraction of their worth. They were indentured servants, bound for the length of their careers to the teams that signed them.

My average salary for eight years in the big leagues came out to $19,500," said former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton. "We weren’t making enough to pay our bills year round.

But in the mid-1970s, decisions by courts and labor arbitrators freed ballplayers to bargain for their value in the marketplace.

His $80 million payroll is less than half of the Yankees,’ but his team is almost always in the hunt.

"salary cap" system to limit the amount of money a team can spend on its players. Organizations using the salary cap approach include the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball League (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Major League Baseball (MLB) is the most popular professional sporting organization in the US to not utilize a salary cap

there is no actual limit to what a baseball team can spend on its players, either individually or as a team.

Enforcement of salary caps places an artificial limit on the amount of money any given player can make

salary caps can create some greatly disparate results in players’ salaries. For example, in the early years of the NBA’s salary cap, teams whose payroll exceeded the newly established caps were not forced to trade players to lower their total payroll, but if they decided not to, they were severely limited in what they could pay their newly-signed rookie players.

salary difference can promote healthy competition among teams and players, this enormous difference in salary demonstrates that the results can sometimes be quite unfair. A rookie player will no doubt want to sign to whichever team drafts him, but his salary may differ dramatically from a fellow rookie on another team based solely on whether there are already expensive star players on his team, without regard to his own level of skill.

If there is a limit to the total team payroll, and the bulk of the money is spent on a few star players, the remaining players on the team will be making much closer to the minimum salary required by the union.

With this kind of activity taking place, the owners are improperly limiting the amount of money a player can make. While it is completely reasonable for an owner to simply decide that he or she does not want to offer a player a salary over a certain amount, it is an entirely different matter to engage in such questionable tactics to artificially limit the team payroll for all teams and all players.

In 2004-05, the National Hockey League (NHL) canceled the entire season largely because of disagreements over a salary cap.

Term designed to convey the desire of team owners to know that player salaries would not exceed a pre-determined percentage of total revenues. As revenues rose, so would the maximum dollar value of team salaries, and vice versa.

salary caps as part of collective bargaining agreements (CBA).

Salary caps began in the major US professional leagues in the 1980s, with initial adoption in the NFL in 1994, the NBA in 1984 (after experiments with it in the 1940s), and the NHL in 2005 (after strict caps imposed during the Great Depression in the 1930s)

salary caps have become largely perceived as a necessary evil, with most disputes centering on the amount of the caps, the percentage of team revenues devoted to player salaries, and the rules governing the treatment of bonuses and incentives.