Give Hospital Cleaners A Christmas Bonus

You know who deserves a Christmas bonus this year?

The people who clean hospitals for a living.

Actually, from now on, just go ahead and pay them more in yearly salary.

According to the New Economics Foundation, hospital cleaners create $16 of value for every $1 they are paid.

Bankers, on the other hand, destroy $11.30 of value for every $1 they are paid.

But bankers aren’t the worst value vampires: tax accountants blast roughly $76 in value for every $1 generated, according to the Foundation.

NEF spokesperson Eilis Lawlor explained to the BBC that her think tank’s formula is not an attempt to undermine workers in any particular social class.

It’s merely for reflecting the true value of society.

“As a society, we need a pay structure which rewards those jobs that create most societal benefit rather than those that generate profits at the expense of society and the environment,” she said.

The conclusion to which the think tank came is pretty obvious: pay people according to their value to society, and add a environmental impacts to the payment levels as well.

And tax the wealthy more.

In A Minute

Unfortunately, the NEF report fails to mention how much value soldiers create or how much they destroy society.

It must depend on one’s point of view.

Is Al-Qaeda a stain?

Is Osama bin Ladin a bargain?

Writing for TomDispatch.com, Jo Comerford estimated that American taxpayers are paying $57,077.60 per minute for the privilege of having American troops surging in Afghanistan.

That calculation seemed to be based purely on labor costs: 30,000 troops at $30 billion equals $57,077.60. That doesn’t count machinery, other assorted technologies, the bases being built, and the training of our so-called “Afghan police force.”

By her calculations, the cost of occupying Afghanistan will be in the neighborhood of $103 billion in 2010 alone.

“That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran’s benefits, from hospital stays to education,” the executive director of the National Priorities Project noted.

And this occupation is not “budget deficit neutral” either.

Since this time in 2007, over seven million jobs have been lost in the United States, she wrote.

For just $30 billion, a lot more could have been bought at home.

“According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers,” Comerford wrote.

So to whom does the Salvation Army bell tolls?

— Nathan Diebenow