Cost of football and fashion could be better spent
Sunday I watched my favorite pro football team, the New York
Giants, beat their hated rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, in the first
regular season game at the Cowboy’s new palatial stadium. Later, I
watched some of
”
60 Minutes.
”
Cost of football and fashion could be better spent
Sunday I watched my favorite pro football team, the New York Giants, beat their hated rivals, the Dallas Cowboys, in the first regular season game at the Cowboy’s new palatial stadium. Later, I watched some of “60 Minutes.”
The 2008 annual payroll for the Cowboys was $146.4 million; for the Giants it was $115.8 million. The new stadium cost about $1.2 billion. The good people of Arlington, Texas put up $933 million in bonds (including interest) increasing the city’s sales tax by 0.5 percent, the hotel occupancy tax by 2 percent, and car rental tax by 5 percent to pay for it. The NFL put up $150 million and the owner covered all the cost overruns.
The average ticket to a Cowboys game costs $159.65. The Fan Cost Index (FCI) takes a representative look at what a family of four could expect to spend at a football game this year. The Cowboys’ FCI is $758.58; the average FCI for the league is $412.64, a 4.1 percent increase from last season. There were 105,000 fans at the game; using the FCI, they spent $20 million there on Sunday.
One of the “60 Minutes stories” was about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and the world she lives in. According to Morley Safer, Vogue is “the last word in sophisticated fashion and fantasy.”
The story said that Wintour is very pampered: her publisher picks up the bill for her hair and makeup every day of the week, and she has a rumored $200,000 a year clothing allowance. When a designer tells her his dress retails for $1,200, she remarks, “It’s very reasonable.”
“Every year Anna organizes a benefit which so far has raised nearly $50 million for the museum’s costume institute. When Anna calls, the fashion houses are only too eager to cough up as much as $250,000 a table.”
The other story on “60 Minutes” was about “The Pentagon’s Bionic Arm” and it reported the amazing progress the Defense Department and brilliant civilian contractors have made in developing a high technology prosthetic arm for use by soldiers who have suffered an arm amputation.
It’s almost impossible to explain the difference between the arm under development and the old artificial arm – you have to see it to believe it – but I’ll try.
The new bionic arm has a hand with fingers that move independently. It has three microprocessors and a system to distribute the weight of the device dynamically on the torso as they use it in different ways. It has foot controls and a vibratory feedback mechanism to regulate “finger” pressure; you can pick up a grape without crushing it. The next big advance will be control via electrical signals from the user’s brain to their muscles – you just think it and the arm does it.
Dr. Geoffrey Ling, an Army colonel and neurologist is running the program. One version of arm is now undergoing clinical testing at the VA in the hope that it will soon becomes available to the nearly 200 arm amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then came the shocker – “Nobody ever wants to put a price tag on making a soldier or a Marine whole again, but, you’re talking about $100 million [over four years]” commented “60 Minutes” reporter Scott Pelley. “It’s a big number.”
No Scott, $25 million a year is peanuts compared to the cost of football, fashion magazines or what these soldiers have already paid.
