The Manchild Chronicles

Blogonomics: Gawker’s Payroll, Redux:

Still, cruising around the Gawker Media stats pages (just put /stats onto the end of the domain in question) does make you realize how the Gawker-obsessed media misses much more important writers for the network as a whole. Do you know who Adam Pash is? He’s a blogger at Lifehacker; he got 5.2 million pageviews in January. Dashiell Bennett got 2.8 million pageviews at Fleshbot.I’d assume that Pash and Diaz are making comfortable six-figure incomes blogging, and that a good few of the “site leads” (Gina Trapani, Brian Lam) are as well. Conversely, some of the less popular bloggers are likely getting paid $50-60,000 per year.

Doubt is immediately cast on the numbers by the commentators, but dividing the editorial budget by the relative eyeball power of the bloggers seems like a pretty good way of figuring out the salaries.

An article from the Christian Science Monitor  (Summer ‘06) estimating the number of illegals per year at 850,000 (from a Pew report)

A quick line from a 2005 nytimes piece:

A simulation by Social Security’s actuaries found that if net immigration ran at 1.3 million a year instead of the 900,000 in their central assumption, the system’s 75-year funding gap would narrow to 1.67 percent of total payroll, from 1.92 percent — savings that come out to half a trillion dollars, valued in today’s money.

The Whitehouse’s response from 2007

The number of green cards issued