All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[MajorHoy]

I think the answer to that is yes. Yes they should get more. Teachers always should be making more than they do. So we can attract more and better qualified teachers. They shouldn't be barely making ends meet. There is always this argument that actual everyday people making money is somehow bad. Or there just isn't enough to go around when it comes to taking care of regular people. But somehow corporations making billions in profits in a pandemic is fine.

One problem with all of this: the public education system isn't a for-profit corporation. If teachers' salaries are raised, it comes out of a budget that is supplied in part by local tax payers. So it's a bigger balancing act when it comes to raising teachers' salaries without a significant raise in how much more in taxes the parents and other people will have to pay to cover the raises.

And for the record, I definitely agree that teachers should be better compensated in many places around the country. I worked for several years as a substitute teacher in one community (the one where I currently live, though I wasn't a resident in the town when I was working there), so my sympathies are with the educators and others that support the kids (like the special education aides, etc.). But how do you find that magic number where the teachers make enough $'s without raising the taxes to a level that make it a hardship for the average taxpayer?

[Kirby101]

Very rich people and corporations used to pay a higher share of taxes. But that has been diminished by the GOP since Reagan. And they will continue to do it until they bankrupt the country. In the mean time funding for things like education and infrastructure suffer. (But never defense)

We have also seen a massive realignment of salaries at the top and bottom.

[Mister Mets]

I wrote a long reply. When I went to edit it, I decided to simplify it.

Your argument is based on objectivism, and full of mule droppings.

DM if you'd like the whole reply.

I am legitimately interested in what you have to say on the topic. It's a public forum, so there isn't much point in DMs on a question of policy.

[Mister Mets]

It’s more than academic studies that indicate a minimum wage works fairly well.

It was first introduced in UK back in 1998. And has worked out so well that no UK political party (including the Conservatives...who I think of as a sane version of US Republicans) has ever seriously proposed doing away with it.

Obviously it’s likely that at some point if you set the level too high it destroys too many job opportunities. Effectively in UK debate has moved on to at what level the minimum should be set...no credible politician advocates removing it completely.

In the US, the majority of the debate is about what the minimum wage should be. If it isn't updated often enough (in the US, it hasn't been increased since July 2009) it's almost the equivalent of not having one.

As far as colleges, in the 1970s, the State paid 70% of the cost. Today it is 17%. With mostly students picking up the cost.
We can blame administrators or Title 9 or any other conservative talking point. But States decided to not fund higher education. And the student loan programs let them put it on the students.

The change in costs isn't mainly about the states.

The cost of college has increased significantly since the 1970s, well in excess of inflation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zengern...h=68e111ec2f98

Very rich people and corporations used to pay a higher share of taxes. But that has been diminished by the GOP since Reagan. And they will continue to do it until they bankrupt the country. In the mean time funding for things like education and infrastructure suffer. (But never defense)

We have also seen a massive realignment of salaries at the top and bottom.

There aren't enough very rich people and corporations to tax to pay for everything. There will have to be significant middle class tax increases. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that it'll be worth it, but local taxpayers would have to pay more to get higher teacher salaries, as well as assorted preferred expensive policy changes.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Supreme Court to again consider federal protections for minority voters

One reason for that historic turnout was due to fear of the virus and people not wanting to congregate in crowded, sometimes cramped spaces where people go to cast their ballots. That was the case with me as I was concerned about going to my local polling place, so I voted by mail, and will do so again. Another reason of course, were minorities who had their fill of Donald Trump and wanted him gone, knowing their lives and livelihoods would suffer if he won a second term and continued making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else while stirring up racism and emboldening white supremacy. Predictably, Qpublicans were unwilling to accept that their hero was responsible for the higher turnout, so they cooked up the excuse that there had been voter fraud, and the rest was history.

[Jack Dracula]

Controlling prices is easy...if you have a centrally controlled economy. For those without a commerce shogun, the more effective levers are either mandating more equitable compensation, or incentivizing more equitable compensation.

Even if you have central controls, there's going to be opportunity costs to the sellers of goods because a black market will appear for anything with any degree of scarcity to it. That will start to imbalance the costs of anything associated with the controlled offering.

Personally, I like the idea being floated of a progressive tax against companies paying under a livable wage.

I think you're correct it'd be a better fix, but the difference is we could pass a minimum wage increase today if we wanted. It looks like business interests/Republicans have successfully avoided having to do that now, and we'll probably end up with some half measure or be told to wait until after the mid-terms. That said, it's still possible if there's political will. Cutting the costs of housing, food, healthcare, energy, etc. across the board in order to benefit the poor and middle class would take USSR levels of state control that we will almost certainly never have. Even when the right proposes something outrageous like opening up protected areas for drilling and someone saner asks if we can set aside a portion of that to help those in need or even to set it aside for the strategic preserves of the country they balk and insist it has to go on the open market internationally.

Honestly we probably don't want our government to have that level of control. The greatest thing Trump may have done for the conservative cause is give the left pause in pushing for greater centralized power, given what can obviously happen if the wrong person is in charge.

Lot's of interesting thoughts here. Clearly, I need to do some research to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
It seems to me that the real problem is an unbalance of political influence with the greater amount belonging to Corporations which makes sense since the rules for campaign finance now favor the largest contributors. If the Democrats would prioritize setting previous limitations back in place I believe they'd find it much easier to implement economic changes. It's not very likely to happen though since they're bound by the same system.

Many forms of price fixing would be difficult, but there are a few major categories where we can cut costs: rent, higher education and health care.

These are costs that have been increasing significantly, largely due to regulations.

A major reason rent is so expensive is that various NIMBY (Not In My BackYard!) laws keep supply low, with onerous approval regulations resulting in delayed constructions as well as restrictions on density and requirements for houses to have a particular level of quality (bans on micro-apartments) making it impossible for ordinary people to afford anything but rent-controlled apartments in high-demand areas. Rent control also comes with some drawbacks, creating incentives for people to stay in high-demand areas that aren't the best fit.

Part of why the cost of higher education has gone up so much is administrative bloat (students paying extra for all those staffers) as well as requirements on nonessential services that colleges/ courses have to offer.

With health care, it's impossible for someone to buy a plan that covers only the rare but expensive situations that make health insurance essential rather than everyday stuff. That would probably result in cost improvements for other plans as they would need to compete with the so-called catastrophic care plans. The same applies if someone can sell smaller apartments in San Francisco or create a college where students get the bare minimum. It gives more choices to people struggling financially, and creates incentives to lower the costs for higher-quality services.

See my comments above Mets.
So many Republican arguments originate from Big Business interests trying to protect and create ever-larger profit margins at the expense of society that I'm not going to waste time and energy picking apart and addressing all the minutia. We both know nothing will come of it.
Every one of your problems could be legitimately addressed and solved to some extent if there weren't billions of dollars being funneled into PAC's and slush-funds specifically to ensure they aren't.

[PwrdOn]

One problem with all of this: the public education system isn't a for-profit corporation. If teachers' salaries are raised, it comes out of a budget that is supplied in part by local tax payers. So it's a bigger balancing act when it comes to raising teachers' salaries without a significant raise in how much more in taxes the parents and other people will have to pay to cover the raises.

And for the record, I definitely agree that teachers should be better compensated in many places around the country. I worked for several years as a substitute teacher in one community (the one where I currently live, though I wasn't a resident in the town when I was working there), so my sympathies are with the educators and others that support the kids (like the special education aides, etc.). But how do you find that magic number where the teachers make enough $'s without raising the taxes to a level that make it a hardship for the average taxpayer?

For one thing, you have to stop relying on property taxes to fund schools and start funding them on the state or even federal level, so that wealthy residents can't just congregrate in gerrymandered school districts and monopolize all the resources for their own kids while forcing poor districts to subsist on crumbs. As for teachers' salaries, the best way to go about this is to create some civilian version of the GI Bill, where you go teach high school in some inner city district for a few years in exchange for the government wiping your student loan debt, or something like that. The issue with teaching is not just that the pay sucks, but also that it's universally seen as kind of a hopeless, dead end career. Giving talented graduates an incentive to teach for a few years, without eliminating the possibility of that lucrative future career on Wall Street or wherever, might help to fill that gap.

[norj]

For one thing, you have to stop relying on property taxes to fund schools and start funding them on the state or even federal level, so that wealthy residents can't just congregrate in gerrymandered school districts and monopolize all the resources for their own kids while forcing poor districts to subsist on crumbs. As for teachers' salaries, the best way to go about this is to create some civilian version of the GI Bill, where you go teach high school in some inner city district for a few years in exchange for the government wiping your student loan debt, or something like that. The issue with teaching is not just that the pay sucks, but also that it's universally seen as kind of a hopeless, dead end career. Giving talented graduates an incentive to teach for a few years, without eliminating the possibility of that lucrative future career on Wall Street or wherever, might help to fill that gap.

Isn't that idea from the West Wing?

[DrNewGod]

For one thing, you have to stop relying on property taxes to fund schools and start funding them on the state or even federal level, so that wealthy residents can't just congregrate in gerrymandered school districts and monopolize all the resources for their own kids while forcing poor districts to subsist on crumbs. As for teachers' salaries, the best way to go about this is to create some civilian version of the GI Bill, where you go teach high school in some inner city district for a few years in exchange for the government wiping your student loan debt, or something like that. The issue with teaching is not just that the pay sucks, but also that it's universally seen as kind of a hopeless, dead end career. Giving talented graduates an incentive to teach for a few years, without eliminating the possibility of that lucrative future career on Wall Street or wherever, might help to fill that gap.

I agree in general with your direction, but federalizing the dollars won't work either. Conservatives will do what they've done in a lot of districts: put their kids in private schools, and pressure elected officials to strangle the public school budgets on the disingenuous grounds that they're socialist.

[Malvolio]

Any business owner who says that they will have to lay people off to pay for a $15 an hour minimum wage for the remaining workers is just using that as an excuse for their own greed.

The reality is that for anyone making the current minimum wage, the only reason they're even making that much is that the government won't let their employer pay them any less. The proof of that is how waiters and waitresses are exempt from the minimum wage laws. Restaurant owners are allowed to pay waiters and waitresses below the minimum wage because tips are "expected." So some restaurant owners do exactly that. But yeah, raising the minimum wage would kill jobs. Yeah, right.

[PwrdOn]

I agree in general with your direction, but federalizing the dollars won't work either. Conservatives will do what they've done in a lot of districts: put their kids in private schools, and pressure elected officials to strangle the public school budgets on the disingenuous grounds that they're socialist.

The solution to that is to make it mandatory that everyone contribute to public education whether they are using it or not. So if you really want little Johnny to be enrolled in some elite academy safely sequestered from all those scary black and brown kids, you can do that, but you'll still have to pay the same taxes as everyone else. I'm sure this will cause an uproar among the usual miscreants though.

Any business owner who says that they will have to lay people off to pay for a $15 an hour minimum wage for the remaining workers is just using that as an excuse for their own greed.

The reality is that for anyone making the current minimum wage, the only reason they're even making that much is that the government won't let their employer pay them any less. The proof of that is how waiters and waitresses are exempt from the minimum wage laws. Restaurant owners are allowed to pay waiters and waitresses below the minimum wage because tips are "expected." So some restaurant owners do exactly that. But yeah, raising the minimum wage would kill jobs. Yeah, right.

Not to mention that a lot of the job loss will be from people working multiple jobs to make ends meet who no longer have to because they can now support themselves with just one.

[Malvolio]

The solution to that is to make it mandatory that everyone contribute to public education whether they are using it or not. So if you really want little Johnny to be enrolled in some elite academy safely sequestered from all those scary black and brown kids, you can do that, but you'll still have to pay the same taxes as everyone else. I'm sure this will cause an uproar among the usual miscreants though.



Not to mention that a lot of the job loss will be from people working multiple jobs to make ends meet who no longer have to because they can now support themselves with just one.

You're probably right. One of my co-workers works a second job, but I know that he would quit that second job in a minute if our job paid him a few dollars more per hour.

[Tami]

You're probably right. One of my co-workers works a second job, but I know that he would quit that second job in a minute if our job paid him a few dollars more per hour.

That could possibly open up new positions for the unemployed.

[MajorHoy]

For one thing, you have to stop relying on property taxes to fund schools and start funding them on the state or even federal level, so that wealthy residents can't just congregrate in gerrymandered school districts and monopolize all the resources for their own kids while forcing poor districts to subsist on crumbs...

Then you're shifting the burden from the local taxes to either state or federal taxes.

Any business owner who says that they will have to lay people off to pay for a $15 an hour minimum wage for the remaining workers is just using that as an excuse for their own greed...

Depends on the "business owner". Not all businesses are the same; some might be small, individual seasonal businesses, like an ice cream stand in a beach community that makes most of its money between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Yes, a McDonald's or a Walmart should probably be paying at least $15 per an hour to workers, but those are companies making major profits (unless maybe the McDonald's is just a single, licensed franchise location).

[PwrdOn]

Then you're shifting the burden from the local taxes to either state or federal taxes.

That's fine by me, there's no question that we have more than enough resources for the task at hand, but that the burden needs to be more shared more evenly. This also has the added side benefit of avoiding those housing bubbles that pop up in wealthy school districts, where high property values lead to well funded schools which attracts more buyers which inflates the prices even more.