most of the money has gone out of mining. After block 800K something, mining rewards got cut down to 1/10th of what they were.. thats why blocktrades and the badger guy were trying to sell off their miner accounts.
my 8 core vps instance gets 40K hashes /sec, and typically gets 1 or 2 POWS (worth 1 steem) a day. I think higher ranked witnesses get more POW opportunities, but im not sure exactly how it works.
but if youre just talking about setting up a rig and letting it run, its probably not going to pay for itself.