Originally Posted By: sinij
Giving back to the community

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Over the past four years, American municipalities have laid off well over a hundred thousand teachers. They've also been firing policemen, firefighters and social workers, but I think it's the firing of teachers that makes the point clearest; it keeps going on and on. (Fresh teacher layoffs are happening this spring in Las Vegas (1,015), Flint (237), Sacramento (400), Gary (169), Cleveland (700), San Diego (1,534) and Los Angeles (9,500).) If you are a regular American who can't afford private school, you are now seeing the quality of your child's education slashed because the federal government is cutting its assistance to cash-strapped states.


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Who should pay? Arguably, no one at all, at least not right now. There is an argument to be made that America should be borrowing and spending far more money right now on needed expenditures like teacher salaries and infrastructure upgrades, since negative real bond yields means it's actually cheaper to borrow the money and pay it back later than it would be to pay for things with taxes right now.


The problems with this are severalfold:

1- scale. there are 180,000 people employed by LA Unified. 9,500 is like 5% of that.
2- unions. the 9,500 teachers laid off werent the worst ones, but the newest
3- non teachers. in most districts there are more non teachers than teachers, also with unions and collective bargaining rights, and finite resources. add to this the enormous bloat at the california dept of Ed and you have a lot of waste.
4- pensions. thank god stockton was dominoe number one and some sanity was injected into the pension system. cant happen soon enough imo

i say all this as a teacher. my once noble profession has been dragged in the shit and is now viewed by taxpayers as full of greedy, lazy, grasping parasites. our pensions and benefits are too lavish. it cannot be sustained.

if they want to talk about giving back 3 things need to happen:
1- every third non teacher needs to be fired
2- the dept of education needs its budget slashed by 90% or more
3- all non social security systems need to be outlawed. id be happy if social security was too but lets be reasonable

KGB Darkfall