Extending the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy will cost $30 billion for a single year and $700 billion for ten years. So the cost wouldn’t even pay for it. And never mind that you’re advocating putting a hundred and forty thousand teachers out of work and commensurately leaving millions of students in massively overcrowded classrooms, all so the richest couple of percent can save a few thousand on their taxes. I would personally say that that proposal sounds like a joke, it’s almost hard to believe that anyone honestly is so bereft of a sense of community.
On top of that it would stimulate the economy far less than teacher salaries. That’s a generally accepted fact.
What is amazing is that your OP made you look really silly, and instead of taking lumps and backing away from the misinformation you posted you’re doubling down. You threw out a bunch of outrage about things that aren’t really happening and now you are trying to twist the narrative to underscore how paying teachers is a bad thing.
I can only assume this is because you want public schools to fail so some bullshit voucher program will be enacted to allow public money to go to (primarily) religious schools. Otherwise I’m just not seeing the rational basis for this argument.
Sam Stone,
You are making the “ordinary people are tightening their belts and so should the government” fallacy which trips so easily off the mouths of pundits and politicians but is pretty much the opposite of the truth. First of all it is not a good thing that the private sector has cut spending so much. That has happened because of the havoc played by the financial sector on the balance sheets of the private sector. Because the whole private sector is busy deleveraging, total demand has collapsed far beyond what would be dictated by ,say, winding down bad investments in the housing sector.
The government doesn’t play by the same rules and that’s a good thing for the economy. It can borrow when everyone else is deleveraging. At the very least it should use that power to avoid cutting spending that it is already carrying out. The low long-term interest rates are in fact a signal from the bond markets encouraging the government to borrow because no one else is.
Is it possible that some of those teachers deserve to be fired? Possibly but this is the worst time to do it. When the economy recovers and interest rates climb, that is the appropriate time for the government to tighten its belt and move towards balanced budgets. As in fact happened in the Clinton administration in the teeth of furious opposition by the Republicans.
In any event I am skeptical that the kind of things you are talking about are at all common. In fact I would wager that the number of districts where teachers are getting raises while firefighters and police officers are getting furloughed is vanishingly small.
The 26 billion will prop up the teacher’s jobs for how many years? If it’s just one, then the cost is comparable.
Wow, look at that spin. Cutting capital gains and dividend taxes will shore up stock prices, for one thing. And that will have a direct effect on retirement savings - including the big retirement savings plans for public unions, which are already grossly underfunded. But it will also stimulate investment. See the latest paper by Romer and Romer, (you know, Obama’s chief economic advisor) which shows that a 1% of GDP tax cut may stimulate investment by as much as 11%.
As for laying off hundreds of thousands of teachers… How about all of them just use that vaunted sense of community and take a 5% pay cut, like the rest of the country had to do? Or even just agree to give up their scheduled pay raises until the crisis is past?
Ah, the old appeal to morality. Teachers are sacrosanct! Think of the children! They’re all angels who toil selflessly for the good of the community. Is that about it? Are they more important than construction workers, truck drivers, engineers, and other groups that have been hit hard by the recession?
Bloody hell it is. Do you have a cite for that? It’s a ‘generally accepted fact’ to the subset of economists that still think a Keynesian stimulus is the way to go (a shrinking group, by the way), that giving money to the unemployed is probably more stimulative than giving it to the wealthy, on the theory that the unemployed will spend all of it and increase the multiplier. This most certainly does not apply to giving 5% pay increases to already-employed teachers.
No, actually the only thing that doesn’t seem to be happening is the mortgage deal, but I reported that from a columnist at Reuters who claimed to have information suggesting that this was going to happen. This was reported widely enough that the administration had to issue a statement saying they weren’t going to do it, so it’s not like I was throwing around crazy ideas from the fringe.
What a crock. Yes, I want schools to fail and children to be thrown out into the street, because those of us who want government to stop spending like drunken sailors are really just closeted child haters.
The fact is, the teacher’s unions are among the most powerful lobbies in the U.S., and have used the government to protect them from the consequences of the recession that everyone in the private sector has to deal with. There’s no excuse for them to be treated differently, especially at a time when the government is about to raise taxes to lower the deficit. If you’re raising taxes and spending at the same time, there is NO stimulative effect. You’re just transferring money from one group to another - in this case from the private sector, which has already taken all kinds of lumps in the recession, to the public sector which hasn’t.
But less. You need to weigh the options:
On the one side you destroy 140k jobs, increase the amount of unemployment, put millions of kids in massively overcrowded classes and for what? The lowering of taxes on the richest Americans. Is it your contention that this is somehow equitable? You know that the economy went along fine before the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy right?
Don’t facts weigh into your opinions?
And how much will be hurt by 140k lost jobs, plus the lost revenue of the taxes, plus the long term problem of a generation of kids having terrible education because it is more important to you that the richest Americans get a break on money they aren’t likely to invest.
How about you take a 5% pay cut while you’re at it? Middle class pay stimulates the economy far more than tax cuts for the wealthy. Look it up.
Don’t be a fool. Teachers aren’t sacrosanct, children are. Teachers are tasked with shepherding America’s children, and hopefully teaching them not to accept unthinking ideological drivel like you’re spouting.
We’ve had threads on this and it’s been shown every time that you’re wrong. Look it up.
You didn’t understand the 26 billion either.
Schooling isn’t what drunken sailors spend money on. Unnecessary and un-stimulative tax cuts for the already wealthy are what drunk sailors spend money on.
The raising of taxes is happening to the richest, who grew the economy fine before the Bush years. Returning them to the previous rate is perfectly reasonable. Seeing as you got your nose bloodied in your farcical Austrian Economics thread, I’ll trust the general consensus of working economists for my economical guidance, rather than the fringe group you’ve glommed on to.
This is a massive pay hike - Okahoma teachers would go from an average salary of $43,551 to 52,551 in three years - at a time when there is no inflation and the cost of living is actually decreasing. It will make Oklahoma teachers the highest paid in their geographic region by about $7,000 per year.
So, teachers get almost a billion dollars in pay hikes, but if they don’t get that extra $119 million, well, they’ll just have to lay off 1900 people. Do you believe that? Does that seem reasonable?
Note that the putative reason the union gave for needing the $829 million was to raise teacher’s salaries to prevent them from leaving the state, because there’s a teacher shortage (according to them). Under what possible logic can you justify raising teacher’s salaries by $829 million to avoid shortages, and then for the sake of not being able to get 15% of that amount from the feds, simply laying off 1900 teachers? Instead, they could achieve the same cost savings by simply lowering the increase in teacher’s salaries from $9,000 over three years to about $7,000 over the same period, which would still make them by far the highest paid in the region. But that’s off the table, you see, because that’s how the unions roll.
This is typical of the bait-and-switch the government pulls. It gives big pay increases to the unions in exchange for political support, and then when the money runs short they claim that there will be ‘massive layoffs’, rather than just negotiating for smaller pay increases. And the Unions make this the easy way for them by screaming and kicking at any suggestion of a pay adjustment, making such adjustments politically difficult.
I gave you a cite in the paragraph you quoted, and I also gave you my own experience. But here’s another cite for you:
Pay increases for public sector workers are not a Keynesian stimulus for several reasons.
First, a Keynesian stimulus is supposed to be temporary, but salary increases are permanent.
Second, preventing job losses is far more important than boosting salaries, so this money could be going towards private sectors jobs.
Third, stimulus money is more effective when it goes to people who spend it, but quite a lot of the increases in compensation that have happened in the recession are in benefits, which have no stimulative effect whatsoever, and because they cost money, are actually anti-stimulative.
Finally, stimulus works better when given to the poor, and public sector workers are not poor.
They certainly do. The problem here is that you accept any glurge uttered by the unions as ‘fact’, and don’t consider that perhaps they are politically connected, very powerful, and have a vested interest in spinning the ‘facts’.
Look at my last message. Last year, the Teacher’s union in Oklahoma lobbied for $829 million in salary increases. They claimed that the money could be raised through cuts in waste. THIS year, they are claiming that if they don’t get $119 million, 1900 teachers will have to be laid off.
Does that smell just a bit to you? This same bait and switch is happening all over the country. I also cited New York, which is also threatening to lay off teachers, while at the same time signing contracts to boost their pay.
What we’re talking about is ultimately this - giving money to teachers to raise their pay, or using the same money to lower the deficit or cut taxes. It doesn’t have to be taxes on the rich. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a tax cut. Use the money to extend unemployment benefits for Americans a little longer.
I already did. My pay has been frozen for two years, resulting in an inflation-adjusted pay cut of around 6%. I’m lucky I’m in Canada. My co-workers in the states got an 8% pay cut in one year by having to take four weeks of unpaid furlough last year.
Come on. You’re not doing any heavy intellectual lifting here, you know. For one thing, there’s not much of a correlation between class sizes and student performance - that’s another canard the teacher’s association likes to push. Second, there’s no reason for ANY teacher layoffs. They can just have their wages frozen like the rest of us, instead of getting 5% annual pay increases during a recession when the rest of the country is taking pay cuts.
“You’re Wrong” == “You don’t agree with the majority of lefties on the SDMB”.
Apparently I understand it much better than you do.
Raising the capital gains tax and and the dividend tax does not just hit the ‘very wealthy’. It hits investment capital of all kinds. It reduces the value of dividends, which reduces the value of blue-chip stocks, which drives more risky investment behavior and hurts conservative mutual funds, such as the kinds of funds that make up many people’s retirement portfolios.
As I said earlier, even Christina Romer’s latest work indicates that higher taxes have an extremely large effect on investment. Analysis of the effects of government action during this recession indicate that tax cuts have worked the best in countering the downturn - the stimulus spending, not so much. Probably because so much of it went to propping up public sector salaries rather than using up slack supply.
This about three kinds of sneaky all at once, Sam. You doff your hat towards Keynesian stimulus while tugging on the rug under its feet at the same time, alluding offhandedly to the “shrinking” status of Keynesian thought amongst economists. Is there some rule that if you only say something off-handedly, you are not required to prove it?
I’m sick and goddamn tired of this idiotic Republican idea that, because there are abuses in New York City by the union, teachers everywhere are selfish fat cats.
I’m earning about $33,000 a year. A 5% tax cut will knock that down by about $1,700. That’s huge for me. I’ve had two years of complete pay freezes: not only no cost-of-living raises, but also they’ve canceled the raises we were supposed to get for experience, the ones I counted on when starting a family.
You think we don’t have a fucking sense of community? You really think that? Because I scrimped and saved to go through college to get my certification; my wife worked many nights of overtime to get it to happen. I chose to do this instead of pursuing a career in Internet marketing.
Yeah, you can get rid of teachers like me. You can humiliate us until we leave the profession. You’ll be left with people for whom $33,000 after a 4-year degree really is the best money they can expect–and I guarantee you won’t like what that does to the public school system.
Sure, there are abuses in New York City. Absolutely address that. But pay attention also to the serious underpayment of teachers in a lot of the country, also.
I’m making two points - one is that the Keynesian model is being increasingly questioned. The other is that even under Keynesian assumptions, using borrowed or taxed money to give raises to public servants is not a particularly good idea. There’s nothing sneaky about it.
If you want me to cite some anti-Keynesian recent work, I’d be happy to:
The last one should send chills through any liberal’s spine - this is Christina Romer, President Obama’s now-ex head of economic advisers, reporting that tax increases are a GDP killer, far more so than previously thought.
Interesting that she has resigned, as has Obama’s budget director, Peter Orzag.
This is a paper by an economist from Harvard and one from the University of Maryland, both of whom are members of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Their findings:
This should make stimulus fans quake as well, because the U.S. debt is already approaching 90%, and will be over 100% within a couple of years. If this paper is right, that means U.S. GDP growth will shrink by at least 1% entirely due to debt effects. And as the debt goes even higher, the problem will get worse.
So between these papers, we find that debt kills growth, and raising taxes kills it even more. What’s the remaining alternative? Oh yeah… cutting government spending. Given this, it’s insane to give public sector workers large raises in a time when there is little inflation but a mounting debt load. And anyone who claims that it’s a ‘fact’ that borrowing more money or increasing taxes to raise teacher’s salaries is stimulative will have their membership in the ‘reality based community’ revoked.
Note that all these papers are recent, using the latest data, and all of them are finding roughly the same effects. Big government hurts growth, tax increases hurt growth, deficits hurt growth. Fiscal stimulus through tax cuts is more effective than fiscal stimulus through increases in spending. All of these directly refute the Keynesian policies advocated by Paul Krugman.
And the empirical evidence keeps coming in. Fears of a new stimulus are driving up long-term interest rates. The economy shed 113,000 jobs last month, almost double the expected amount, primarily due to lower than expected private sector job growth. In addition, last quarter’s GDP gain has been revised downwards from 2.4% to 1.7%.
Of course, the argument is always that if there had been no fiscal stimulus things would have been much worse. But many other countries had smaller stimuli, and are doing as well or better than the U.S. Europe’s economy has actually improved since the various austerity plans were announced.
I’m sure there are exceptions. I’m sure there are underpaid teachers in some areas. However, how about addressing the specific cases I mentioned? How about Oklahoma, giving $9,000 per year raises to their teachers, then claiming that if they don’t get 15% of that money, they’ll have to lay off 1900 teachers? Does that sound reasonable to you?
Yeah, recessions suck, don’t they? But why is your pain more important than the pain of, say, our office manager, who was laid off because of the recession, or the people in my company making $35,000 per year who had to take an 8% pay cut in one year followed by two years of pay freezes? Why is your pain more important than the pain of the 26.5% of young people who can’t find work at all?
Great. Because if you’d chosen that career, you’d probably be completely unemployed. Marketing is one of the industries that’s been hit hard.
You have an attitude of real entitlement. You scrimped and saved to go through college, so damn it, you DESERVE your job and pay raise. I’ve got news for you: the same can be said for everyone who lost their jobs in this recession. What makes you special?
I can say the same thing about professionals in every field. Recessions suck. People’s lifestyles get hurt. Families are torn apart. Retirement savings are lost. You’re lucky - you’ve got a teacher’s pension. The people in my company who lost their jobs don’t have anywhere near the kind of pension most public union members get, and if they get laid off more than a few years away from retirement, the pension amounts to damned little.
I WAS addressing that. You didn’t bother to respond to it. I also addressed the situation in Oklahoma. But rather than respond factually to the point I brought up, you decided to throw a strawman into the mix, coupled with your own personal sob story. I’m sorry for any hardship you might be going through, but you’re not unique, and just because you’re a teacher does not mean you should be immune from the pain everyone else is suffering.
I note that there doesn’t seem to be a major teacher shortage, though. If teachers were truly underpaid, how come there are so many people trying to get into teaching? Could it be perhaps that they are motivated by things other than pay, such as job security, retirement benefits, love of teaching, the working environment, the time off in the summer, or other factors? Or perhaps on average teachers aren’t actually underpaid when you factor benefits and hours worked?
Again, none of this is to suggest that there aren’t areas where teachers are underpaid, but in the general case they seem to do pretty well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker. That includes specialties like architect and economist. And since then, private sector wages have fallen while public sector wages have gone up. Does that seem fair to you?
No, it really isn’t. You said that an article you linked to had some information in it that it did not actually have, didn’t you? Presumably you read your own cite, so I can only conclude that you knew the information you claimed resided in the linked article did not exist.
I really can’t move past that point until you acknowledge what you did.
I said, “Next, Nancy Pelosi is recalling the House back into session to pass a 26 billion dollar ‘stimulus’, aimed primarily at propping up the salaries of teachers so they don’t have to take pay cuts.” I linked to an article about the 26 billion stimulus. The article says the money was going to be used to save jobs, and you thought you had a ‘gotcha’. I therefore pointed out that this was just a ruse. I then backed that point up with hard data.
So you feel free to move wherever you want. I posted lots of data showing that the two really were indistinguishable, and that it’s just a matter of definition. If the teachers just got 860 billion for pay raises, and now they want 119 billion or they’ll cut 1900 jobs, then it’s pretty clear that the money is just paying for part of a large pay increase.
I have a feeling you’d rather not discuss the numerous well-cited points I brought up, so you’re trying to stick to some kind of ‘principle’ that allows you to dodge the whole thing.
Oh, I didn’t notice the third thing. The GM lender thing. Um, I dunno. That one might be OK, it’s the GMAC idea, right?
But I meant…
bailing out underwater mortgages. It depends on how it’s written, but I think it’s a good idea in general, as land prices have dropped so much.
stimulus for teachers. States, localities, & school boards have lost money due to falling land prices & a slowed economy. My inner Jacobin wants to see all these civil servants laid off long enough that people realize how bad an idea it is. But I can’t blame the feds for trying to do the right thing. (According to Keynes, who was sane. Sam is just wrong here.)
So if the states, localities and school boards are losing so much money, why are they giving raises to teachers and other public union members?
And you don’t just get to claim that Keynes was sane as if that closes the matter. I just linked to a whole bunch of heavyweight economists whose findings contradict those of Keynes. Or more accurately, who show that in today’s high-debt environment, there are offsetting effects that constrain the kinds of multipliers pure Keynesianism would expect. Did you look at any of the cited papers? They’re all peer reviewed papers published in the most prestigious economic journals, by some of the best economists working today - including Obama’s own chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.
Do you just dismiss all of this out of hand? If so, by what justification?
Are you really serious? What about me. I have been either unemployed or underemployed for the last 18 months, but I finally found a job and will soon be paying 30% or more of my salary in taxes. As I said before, I am not underwater with my mortgage, but I have lost all my equity, to the tune of $150k or so. Now you think it would be a good idea to take 30% of my salary and give it to people that bought houses with little or no down payment (as these people most likely represent the majority of those underwater) while I saved money all through my twenties and early thirties in order to buy a house with 40% down? Really, you think this is a good idea? What about me, how is the government going to help me now that my land prices have dropped so much? Are they going to give me back my 150 grand, or is it only going to go to those that were not as good at saving money as me?
I agree with you, but how is that any different than a situation where you spent ten years to go to school and study hard, and now the government is going to take 50% of your salary and use it to ‘spread the wealth around’ to other people, solely on the condition that they make less than you? Why doesn’t that bother you?
The whole premise of wealth redistribution is that anyone who has more money should give some of it to people who have less, just because they have less. Maybe they spent their 20’s partying while you studied your ass off, and now that you’re making more money than they do, you have to give some of it to them. This, in lefty-speak, is ‘fairness’.
You worked hard and bought a house prudently. Therefore, you are not at risk of losing your home. Other people made poorer decisions, and now are in trouble. Therefore, you have an obligation to help them. The government will force it upon you, because the government is the right tool for wealth redistribution. Why do you have a problem with that?
Of course, the moral message to you is that you’re a sucker for having been cautious and careful with your money. You should go out and speculate, comfortable in the knowledge that if the market takes off, you’ll do better than your neighbors. If the market tanks, well, your neighbors have a responsibility to bail you out. It’s only fair.