“We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers’ raw dedication and forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don’t make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren’t they too stupid to be teaching our kids?”
Ann Coulter, Godless
Since we’re randomly lobbing missiles for “humanitarian” purposes, why stop at Libya? How about Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Ivory Coast? At least when we blow up missiles someone has to make more missiles, which is a lot more productive than supporting the fat-ass government bureaucracy that produces nothing but regulations and kids who can’t read.
Do you really want to help teachers? Do you love teachers? Then let’s get rid of make-work BS six-figure government jobs like Climate Change Program Manager, pay teachers based on merit, fire those that need to be fired and make schools compete. In the process, you’ll help the children as well.
When faced with a choice of having to pay a little more for their own pensions and health care, public employees in Wisconsin basically rioted. Instead of doing the right and rational thing they chose to force Governor Walker to institute layoffs to help bring a modicum of sanity to the state’s budgetary Armageddon.
So let’s get this straight… When asked to fly a little closer to the reality the rest of us live in, teachers and their unions said, “Hell no, we won’t go.” I’d love to have a sweetheart deal like that, one that guarantees I can’t get fired for incompetence or laziness (or just about anything else), that pays more than most other professionals earn (you can look it up), basically free health care and pension plans, and about a third of the year off for vacation. It once again begs the question posed by Ann Coulter above, that given that, “aren’t they too stupid to be teaching our kids?”
Unfortunately, I live in a reality called the private sector, a sector being abandoned by more and more people as they realize that the crime of big, corrupt and crony government surely does pay. I discussed this problem earlier after reading a job description on one of the job boards for a Climate Change Program Manager at the National Park Service. I won’t rehash the whole thing, but this pointless make-work job brings in anywhere from $103,000 to $155,000.
When progressives protest budget cuts and clamor for more and more government, they cite the saints of public service – teachers, fire fighters and cops (the only time they like cops). I’m actually well and good with paying all of the above handsomely, though I must add that it should be merit based and they should be able to be fired.
The problem is that you can’t pay those who are actually rendering a public service handsomely when some Schmoe is pulling in six figures at a BS National Park Service job. The bigger problem is that there are literally thousands of the Schmoes at all levels of government with BS jobs raking in the dough at the taxpayer’s, and teacher’s, expense.
The following excerpt from the Dec. 11, 2009 edition of USA Today bears repeating here:
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted. Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector… When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
These disgusting statistics are merely the tip of an iceberg, with state and local governments aboard a federal Titanic steaming full speed ahead that isn’t equipped with enough lifeboats. And yet, progressives fight any budget cuts and limits on government tooth and nail, despite the fact that doing both would benefit their beloved teachers, fire fighters and cops.
Progressives are notoriously ignorant of economics. I don’t think progressives are stupid, by and large, but willfully ignorant. They are generally economically illiterate because any cursory knowledge of economics would explode their entire ideology and they’d have to become conservatives, or at least libertarians.
Progressives fail to realize that government monopolies are, by their very nature, resistant to any type of positive reform or innovation. Thus they ossify, becoming inflexible and of no practical good to anyone but those who work for the system. Modern liberalism is, in fact, illiberal and has become the worst kind of conservatism you could possibly imagine.
People try to put us down… Yeah, that’s because you screwed future generations with your My Generation crap, dumbasses. And, by the way, you didn’t die before you got old like you were supposed to.
Reform education? Hell no! It’s all about “the children,” so we must not improve it or allow any of the unwashed masses a choice. Rather, we should pour more money into it, most of which goes to the adults and their precious paychecks, pensions and health care. Reform entitlements? Hell no! They’re headed for a massive implosion, but I’ll have mine for my retirement and I’ll be dead by then, so let them drive clown cars!
My children are quite thankful for these selfless adults. Still, they wonder why the Worthless Generation didn’t take Roger Daltrey’s advice in My Generation to heart.
One of the consequences of pouring more manpower and money into government work and jealously guarding government monopolies in certain areas, like education, is either a negative or flat return on investment. But start providing data and evidence and a liberal’s eyes will start glazing over because there’s no emotion in numbers or logic. Stephen Moore laid it out in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial:
The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.
Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.
