WaPo has an interesting “what people make” chart: Ed Meese makes $293,500 as a Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Not bad for sitting around with your thumbs up your ass churning out right-wing bullshit with the help of some interns.
That’s slightly more than Jon Podesta makes for being the head of Center for American Progress. Strobe Talbot makes $412,500 heading up the Brookings Institute Institution (which, as I understand it, used to be liberal but is now primarily neocon).
Update. This is interesting (from 2004):
Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation, earned $540,776 in 2003, which consumed about 1.7 percent of the charity’s $31.5-million of income. Mr. Feulner has received bonuses exceeding $200,000 in each of the past seven years — a compensation structure that Ted Schelenski, Heritage’s vice president of finance and administration, attributes to the organization’s desire to “operate as much like a business as possible.”
That was in 2003, so assuming a 4 percent raise per year (which seems about right, based on the typical increases mentioned in the article), he would be making about 685K in 2009.
Update update: In fact, Feulner made 855K in 2007.