The other day, I participated in a fundraiser in Suffolk, Va., not far from Williamsburg, to benefit a local homeless shelter and a new free medical clinic. Before the evening program took place at a Suffolk arts center, the director of the Center for Hope and New Beginnings, Brenda Galen, gave me a tour of the facility. The center can house 41 people at a time for up to six weeks each. Its mission is to serve as a transitional not a permanent housing facility. Residents are required to help out around the center and to seek a job every business day. Some limited programs are available to help the homeless learn basic skills of self-reliance.

When we stopped by, some of the residents were having a barbecue for a family that was moving away. A U-Haul was idling in the alleyway.

Meanwhile, large black women shuttled large bowls of potato salad, fish, potato chips and bread from the kitchen out to the backyard. Wide-eyed children rushed about on children's adventures through the shelter.

I felt terribly self-conscious just being there - peering into the lives of America's least fortunate citizens - and I imagined that the residents must resent some white performer bustling through on the pro forma half hour tour. I know how I would feel if a group of strangers came poking about my kitchen, bathroom, laundry room and bedroom.

I don't know if there is any dignity in homelessness, but I knew for certain that I could not possibly be adding to its sum.

We raised a bunch of money that evening. I don't know how much. Whatever it was, it was a drop in the bucket.

Ms. Galen informed me that her 2006 budget was somewhere around $260,000. This year, she hopes to raise the budget to more than $400,000.

Let's put that into perspective. Former President William Jefferson Clinton routinely commands $150,000-$200,000 (plus transportation, plus accommodations, plus other "expenses") to give a speech somewhere. In other words, on a good day, in a single hour, he trumps the annual budget for a homeless shelter that has to scramble every day just to keep its doors open, in order to do utterly unglamorous work on behalf of America's least fortunate people. How much prep time do you think Mr. Clinton gives to a routine talk before the Soap Manufacturers of America or the Taiwan Chamber of Commerce?

Bill Clinton's advance for his autobiography "My Life" was $12 million. That sum alone would fund the Center for Hope and New Beginnings for 48 years.

Kobe Bryant is paid more than $30 million per year by the Los Angeles Lakers. (In other words, Bryant earns more in a single game than the annual budget of the Suffolk homeless shelter). In 2006, Tiger Woods took in more than $100 million in purses and endorsements. Oprah makes more than $200 million per year. Johnny Depp was paid $28 million for "Pirates of the Caribbean." Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz earn $15 million per movie. The median CEO salary in America is more than $14 million per year. In 2006, Occidental Petroleum's Ray Irani earned $52,143,188 in salary, bonuses, perks and stocks. The CEO of Ford, Alan Mullally, took in $39,128,100. Irani's annual salary would put a safety net under Suffolk, Virginia's, homeless for 208 years.

You get the point.

What does it say about us that we pay people who do inessential things - bounce or whack or catch a ball, dress up like a pirate with a heart of gold - astronomical sums of money, while we pay teachers, child care providers, janitors, hospital staff, ranch hands and food service employees barely enough to live in modesty?

I met a waitress the other night who earns more money working in a sports bar than she did as a skilled employee in a long term care facility. What CEO, anywhere, however talented, can in any meaningful sense be said to earn $20 million per year? How is it that the mechanic who fixes my car earns $30,000 per year and the man who presides over the car's manufacture earns $30 million? That's a thousand times more money.

Capitalism is about attaching a monetary figure to all the goods and all the services. How much we pay tells us what we value. The essential jobs of our civilization - taking care of the elderly, watching our children while we work, educating young people, cleaning up, working with livestock - we pay almost nothing. We could live without another lecture by Bill Clinton or Rudy Giuliani, but we couldn't live without garbage collection. It may even be that my garbage collector is a wiser man.

Starting salary for a teacher in North Dakota? $23,591.

What happened to the idea of the inherent dignity of work?

One of the things Jefferson loved most in America was what he called the essential "equality of circumstances" among the population (in 1800) of six million. Few rich, fewer poor and a middle class that stretched nearly from one end of the social spectrum to the other. He not only admired the equality of circumstances here for what it revealed about the national character of America, but he believed that only under such circumstances can a society be a republic.

The growing (and hardening) class system in the United States is a greater threat to our future than al-Qaida, what is increasingly called "Islamofascism," and a nuclear North Korea. It is also a growing threat to the character of North Dakota, which has, in my opinion, long ranked as the most egalitarian, and therefore the best, place in America. What can be done? How about a severely graduated income tax for salaries in excess of $500,000 per year?

There are more than 700 homeless people in North Dakota. One in 10 North Dakotans lives below the poverty line. The federal food stamp program assists more than 40,000 North Dakotans per year.

Oh yes, I know what the laissez faire obsessives will say. They will extol the blessings of the free market and remind me sternly that in a capitalist universe everyone is worth precisely what the market is willing to pay. They will hint darkly that thoughts like these are really little more than socialism - or worse - and declare in alarmed and stentorian terms that legal protection of property and wealth is the bulwark of the American way of life.

They may even hint that I am overpaid for my work (true) and that if I feel so strongly about it, I can donate a portion - you know the rest.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismack. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)