Editorial: Yachting budget obscene

There are a lot of people out there who do good work and pour in long, often fraught hours, for what could best be described as modest wages.

Many of them are in crucial jobs ... people jobs. Where they assist, teach, heal and look after people.

I daresay many reach the point, at the end of a long day or a long week, where they roll their eyes skyward after checking their income against the bills which arrived in the mail.

Like the bemoaning words of Dickens' Mr Micawber ... "annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."

It's tough out there, even for those who may have two modest incomes arriving in the household, and tougher on those in essential health and education-related positions who must sometimes ask themselves why they bother.

They probably do that while checking out fares to Australia.

Money ... yes ... it's a funny old thing.

Or not so funny when the exorbitant power bill turns up alongside the rates demand.

But some people are laughing of course, and their financial "situations" certainly make a joke of what's worth what.

Like professional footballers and baseballers in Europe and the US. They are paid in millions. Some of them tens of millions. For simply playing a game.

It is ridiculous.

Not as ridiculous as the $1.3 million a day (yes, a day) paid out to Apple boss Tim Cook last year in his $476 million salary package.

Does anyone truly earn a million dollars a day? I don't think so. Maybe if they paid him a paltry $100,000 a day and put the other $900,000 into employment schemes.

We here in the southern oceans are not immune to big monies being dished about of course, and I was somewhat staggered (to put it mildly) to hear that the four teams (yep, only four of them) setting out to contest the now pointless America's Cup will need budgets around the $100 million mark.

Can that be right?

Probably, given this once prestigious and truly international event has now become the play-thing of billionaires whose egos are only equalled in size by their personal salaries.

Yet the New Zealand America's Cup team has decided to be part of this irrelevant circus.

So where does all the money come from?

I'm all for yachting on a sporting and competitive basis ... but not as a money pit where the benefits to the greater populace can only be described as minimal.

Their sponsors won't be coughing all of it up, so I suspect the Government (make that taxpayers) will likely step in the way they did nine years ago when they produced a $33 million injection to the team. I can think of better ways to utilise massive hand-outs. So too I daresay can nurses, caregivers, teachers ... You can add the rest here.