[link|http://www.miamiherald.com/103/story/103128.html|Miami Herald]
Shareholders officially elected former Gov. Jeb Bush to the board of Tenet Healthcare on Thursday -- a part-time job that will bring him over $450,000 in the next year.

On Wednesday, Brett Arends, a columnist at TheStreet.com, calculated Bush would be earning $36,500 a day for 13 days of work a year, and if board meetings lasted four hours each, that meant the former governor would be getting $9,125 an hour.

That includes his signing bonus, so after the first year it goes down. But considering the work done, it is still outrageous. He will be getting a minimum of $195,000 every year he is on the board, for less then one month of work.

That doesn't make him a special case at Tenet, however, because SEC filings show the company's board members earned between $409,000 and $590,000 for 2006.

Those numbers are way above the directors' compensation for the Standard & Poor's 500 companies, which paid an average of $120,000 for retainer and equity in 2006, according to Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate with The Corporate Library, a Portland, Me., group offering independent compensation analysis.

Directors' compensation has been going up rapidly -- about 20 percent a year for the past two or three years, said Hodgson, meaning 2007 pay for S&P 500 directors might average about $140,000.

Looks like there is another scandal in the brewing there.

Jay