First things first, Snowflake:
Which of these two things is Congress specifically empowered to levy taxes for and allocate funds?
1. The Military.
2. Education.
Think hard.
Next.
Let's talk about the legalized extortion known as unions.
Education has a funding problem.
The problem is the taxpayers have definitely noticed that while spending per pupil has gone up a great deal, test scores have remained flat. They've also noticed that teacher salaries have gone up, and those scores remain flat.
They've begun to notice that teachers aren't teaching their children things they wish their children to learn.
Those things have evaporated all the sympathy the tax paying citizen had for the poor underpaid teacher.
But the funding problem isn't from overpaying teachers. It's from over pensioning them.
Teachers tend to fall into the same fellow travelers group as social justice warriors, and thus get favorable mentions from the media about the evil of denying them their fair wages.
What the unions have done is taken advantage of elected officials desperate desire to make the strike and bad publicity go away before it's election time by essentially caving in to the union demands.
That includes lavish pensions. Pensions that simply do not exist outside of non-government, non-union careers. Retirement ages can be as low as 44.
Think about that.
Since the average lifespan is pushing 75, that's 20 years of work right out of college then 31 years of retirement at full pay. Pretty sweet, huh?
Well, there's this thing called inflation, and that means that the pension must write a larger check over time to keep the pensioner in the lifestyle they've become accustomed to. Which means the pension fund must take in more money over time just to stay on the same financial footing.
Add in that the number of people collecting the pension is increasing faster than the number of people contributing to the fund, that means a lot more money has to be collected to keep up.
People who are looking at working, literally, until they die at their desks, are noticing. They are becoming resentful. They are slowly beginning to not give a fuck if a teacher starves to death freezing under an overpass.
Maybe if the teachers were doing an exemplary job teaching their children the things they want them to learn... but alas...
And don't forget the 'administrators' that 'support' those teachers! They've multiplied like rats, actually LOWERING the $$/student ratio in many school districts!
ReplyDeleteIt'd also be nice if firing an incompetent teacher (particularly in places like, you should pardon the phrase, New York City) was slightly less involved and complicated. Even teachers who've been convicted of crimes keep their paychecks while in jail.
ReplyDelete