Infographic by Reuben Fischer-Baum at Deadspin.com, reposted with permission.

I've never been prouder to be from a blue state. And by blue, I mean a state whose highest-paid public employee is not a football coach. Or a basketball coach, either.

I first came across this gorgeous infographic on a site called Addicting Info under the headline "Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image." It credited the map to "America The Stupid courtesy of WTHR TV," but the WTHR folks pointed me to Deadspin.com, where Reuben Fischer-Baum actually created it here. The Deadspinners kindly permitted us to re-post it.

Readers, even sports-crazed Boston readers, really, do you think this national state of affairs is right?

As you compose your answer, I have a second point to discuss. Naturally, from my provincial Massachusetts point of view, I was curious about our state's entry for the highest-paid public employee, "Med school chancellor."

It took about one minute to find this year's Boston Globe story on the list of top public-salary earners, including this:

The University of Massachusetts dominated the list of state employees who made more than $100,000 last year, with 49 of the top 50 spots held by doctors, administrators, and coaches. At $784,468, the top 2012 salary ­belonged to Michael F. Collins, who holds dual roles in the university, as chancellor of the medical school and ­senior vice president for health sciences at the university. He was also the state’s highest paid employee in 2011. For the second year in a row, the number two salary went to Terence R. Flotte, the medical school’s dean, who was paid $712,041. Typically, UMass employees, particularly those at the medical school, are heavily represented in the top-earner brackets. Overall, nearly 7,700 state employees across a variety of departments earned $100,000 or more, up from about 6,900 employees in 2011. In total, the state employs about 100,000 full- and part-time workers. Governor Deval Patrick, who earns $139,832, could not even crack the top 1,500. He was clustered in with State Police officers, professors, and a dentist.

So here's my second question: Of course, public employees' salaries need to be comparable to private-sector salaries if we want to attract good people to public service. But is there not also something called "enough"? At what point does a taxpayer-paid or nonprofit salary become unseemly?

This issue also came up in March, at a panel discussion on rich and poor hospitals at the Boston convention of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

A reporter in the audience, Ron Shinkman of Payers & Providers, came to the microphone and asked, quite politely, about the salary of well over a million dollars that Boston Medical Center chief Kate Walsh is paid. (He explained to me later that he had downloaded the hospital's 2010 tax return from Guidestar.org to his cell phone during the panel talk and checked its financials. Walsh's 2010 compensation was $1.34 million for nine months of work that year, he said, which he extrapolated to a nearly $1.7 million annual salary.)