Posted on 06/01/2006 3:53:51 PM PDT by ProCivitas
Why do financially pushy parents want their children to marry doctors? Because, as Willie Sutton said of banks, that is where the money is.
Top Paying JobsWonder why your parents wanted you to become a doctor? Nine of the top ten highest paying jobs are in the medical field.
Surgeon Anesthesiologists Obstetricians & Gynecologists More of the 25 Highest Paying Jobs The medical profession dominates the top end of our list of the 25 best and worst paying jobs in America. Surgeons are No. 1, with the next seven spots taken by various sorts of specialist practitioners. Chief executives, at No. 9, and airline pilots, at No. 13, are the only two nonmedical occupations in the top 15.
At the other end of the scale are jobs in hotels, restaurants and leisure businesses. Lowest paid of all? Fast-food cooks, followed by busboys, dishwashers and waiters.
Worst Paying JobsYou wonder why fast food restaurants usually have "Now Hiring" signs out front?
Cooks, Fast FoodFood Preparation & Serving WorkersDining Room, Cafeteria Attendants & Bartender HelpMore of the 25 Worst-Paying Jobs According to government data, the mean annual salary for America's 55,390 surgeons is $181,850; for a fast-food cook, $15,230. The mean annual pay for all jobs is $37,440.
Our numbers are drawn from the government's National, State and Metropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates. They, in turn, are based on a national survey of employers (the latest available one is from 2004) of every size and in all industry sectors. They cover 800 occupations.
The survey covers full- and part-time workers who are paid a wage or salary. It does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers and unpaid family workers.
Click here to see America's 25 best-paying jobs.
Click here to see America's 25 worst-paying jobs.
It asks about basic pay, incentive bonuses and commissions, but not overtime pay or non-wage compensation, such as stock options... That all helps explain why mean annual wages appear lower than one might have expected at the top end and higher at the bottom, where undocumented workers are unlikely to be counted accurately. Remember, too, that these are mean salaries and that they give no indication of how distant the outliers at either end of the salary scale for any occupation might be. There are plenty of lawyers that earn a lot more than $110,590, and surely there are dishwashers who earn a lot less than $15,670.
Earnings can vary widely for the same job in different industries and in different places. Farm workers and nurserymen who work for the federal government, for example, earn almost twice the average for the occupation. Ditto laundry and dry-cleaning workers.
In certain occupations the discrepancy occurs because they are niche jobs in generally high-paying industries. The 150 souls employed to prepare food at law firms earn, at $29,020 on average, two-thirds as much as the 197,980 cooks working in full-service restaurants.
Where you live can also have a huge impact on what you make. The states and metropolitan areas in the high-wage Northeast pay top dollar in many occupations.
Jobs That Won't DisappearSome careers will most likely never completely disappear, though they may change dramatically.
PoliticanMorticiansBarbersTax CollectorsArtistsMore Jobs That Won't Disappear ... Fast-food cooks in the Worcester, Mass., metro area had an annual mean wage of $26,320, 73% more than the national average, and about the same as veterinarian technicians. Overall, Massachusetts is the most lucrative state for fast-food cooks, with an annual mean wage of $21,060. Fast-food cooks in neighboring Connecticut also earned more than $20,000 per year on average...
As for America's 334,960 chief executives, New Jersey is the place to be. CEOs in the Garden State made $172,960 per year on average. But as our annual list of bosses' pay shows, there are plenty of chief executives that earn a lot more than that.
The 30 chief executives of securities and commodities exchanges are on average better paid than their peers, at $189,950 per year. Run an architectural or engineering firm, and you're likely to earn only $152,340 per year. Among the worst paid of all chief executives are those in local government ($81,780), but at 19,590, there are more of them than in any other industry.
How can you tell when you're in an 'End-Game Economy'?
My cousin was a short-order cook in an extremely busy breakfast joint.
He learned his cooking "skills" in the Navy and took the job after getting out. He said you have to be quick, keep track of the orders, and churn them out like you’re insane.
He started around 4:00am and was home by 10:30am
He pulled in six figures and that was back around 1986.
I guess it depends what you’re cooking and where you’re working.
Using a Ping
to again ask: How can you tell when you're in an 'End-Game Economy'?
I imagine this study doesn't include these gray-market payment schemes.
When I google "endgame economy" it gives me 3 choices: a Chess site, A World of Warcraft site, and a third computer game site.
You should explain yourself. I'd guess you mean we're all going to die because the US is turning into a third world banana republic.
And I would disagree with that.
and the Fair tax would catch that..
If certain smelly things start hitting the fan in this country, then jobs and capital will move to other locations.
People will adjust. They always do.
If low-paying retail is the biggest and growing part of our economy, and if temp-services like Manpower are among our top three employers, and if American households have undertaken record debt; If our family-wage manufacturing base is eroded while we sell raw materials to corporations in other countries that sell the value-added manufactured result back to us -- too often on our credit card; If our trade deficit runs in the hundreds of billions and our national debt skyrockets, and our federal public employees consider 'monetizing our debt'(currency devaluation)...
Well then, our economy and nation would appear to be seriously undermined and jeopardized. Leaving the 'highly insulated' sectors/personnel of our economy (noted in the Forbes piece) we hope not unconcerned about the condition of their countrymen.
The Economic levels of Nations are not eternal -- like Liberty, they require a certain civic vigilance.
For instance, I doubt that there is a statistical difference between the salaries of many of the kinds of doctors listed. If the mean is within a couple of thousand dollars and the salaries are in the $150,000 range, the difference is more likely related to the geographical distribution of the doctors that they surveyed. Many specialists live only in the cities, and the cost of living is higher in cities. Therefore, their average is higher than that of doctors who are spread across urban and rural areas.
I noticed that they didn't list entertainer. That's another interesting field and another example of a job where the average is meaningless. The top people in the entertainment field make millions of dollars. The bottom people make almost nothing as they wait tables and get bit parts. Which ones would go into computing the "average?" Does anyone make a regular, middle-class income in entertainment or is everyone either dirt poor or filthy rich?
Not including overtime pay also makes the list meaningless. There was a time ten or twenty years ago when the highest paid employee at a major refinery (that will not be named) was the refinery manager. The second highest paid employee was a pipe-fitter who was good at his job and volunteered for huge amounts of overtime. Depending on a plant's shift schedules, many people on shift work make a significant amount of overtime pay. If the shift schedule is arranged well, they can do this without sacrificing the chance to have a full personal life outside work. While I wouldn't want to do that work, the people who are doing it are doing very well in many cases.
Another important factor is whether the demand for a particular kind of job is steady and whether that demand will remain steady. Most people can't make much money when they are training for a new career, so the ones who are forced to change careers often will end up far behind economically. If they wanted to offer a list that would help people, they'd address this issue as well.
Bill
Why did you ping me? Please don't do that again.
Is that you, Ross Perot?
If there is going to be an endgame in America it will be happening at the same time millions of 'pawns' are streaming "en passant" across our borders!
I'd a thought that mlb players would be # 1.
Your third party premise is rather weak. Orthodontists rank number five and most folks pay out of pocket for their kids braces. If we truly had a free market health care system, the best docs would make more than they are now. Kinda like atheletes. On the other hand we could start importing more foreign medical grads to up the supply but at the risk of lower quality.
Furthermore, academics by in large make less than equivalent trained folks in private industry. Docs at the VA or Universities usually make less than in private practice. The primary reason for the pay disparity between docs is the private practice docs work at least twice as hard.
When the only reason you can still get a job is that not many immigrants can say "Do you want fries with that?" in English.
When your kids don't go to college because they might as well get started straight into used car sales.
Oh, wait! My list is starting to look like yours, anyway.
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