Public sector unions, we're on to you, particularly the teachers union. Some of us have been on to you for years, warning that inflated salaries and benefits would lead to fiscal calamity. For many states, that calamity is here. It's unfortunate that it takes a crisis to get anyone to focus.
How many times have we heard, "You can't pay teachers enough," or, "We have to pass bigger budgets to preserve our home values." These stubbornly held shibboleths seem risible now. Our home values have been trashed by tax levies, and all that money wasn't going into the classroom, anyway. It was never about the kids.
As far as teacher pay, here are the words, like Voldermort, that one dares not say: teachers are paid too much. (Pause…hey, I'm still here.) Consider two facts. First, our area private schools manage to attract first–rate talent for around 70% of public teacher salaries. Further, private school teachers don't get guaranteed lifetime pensions and family health, they don't get paid extra for coaching or helping with the school play or monitoring recess, they don't get tenure, automatic raises irrespective of performance, 15 sick days, five bereavement days, three religious holidays (in addition to Christian and Jewish), and four personal days. They don't get $1339 for overseeing the juggling club. (See the BCSD contract for all of this.) If private school teachers get sick, they don't come in that day like the rest of us. The average private school teacher takes less than one sick day a year.
Second, did you know most teachers are millionaires? If you present value their retirement benefits, you get to $1 million pretty easily. Say a teacher retired this year. That teacher gets 70%, give or take, of their salary for the rest of his or her life. That's about $84,000 a year (not taxed by the state, incidentally). Plus, they get health benefits for their entire family for life. That's worth another $16,000 a year, for a total of $100,000 a year. Live for 25 years and that's a total 0f $2.5 million. Discounted at 4%, it's $1.6 million.
There is zero difference between this and having an IRA with a value of $1.6 million, except the rest of us didn't demand that taxpayers fund our IRAs. Still think teachers are underpaid?
We need grownups to wrest control of the situation. For years, politicians, from governors down to school boards, have been giving away taxpayer money in exchange for votes and political contributions. It is institutionalized corruption and it has brought our state and others to edge of calamity. It has raised taxes so much that 1.8 million people have fled the state in the last decade, including my mother who left last month after 80 years because she couldn't take it anymore.
I am not anti-teacher. We have many fine ones, and sadly they are forced by law to join the union. That union plays a nasty and thuggish game, and for years no one called them on it. Now everyone is, and across political parties. Cuomo, Bloomberg, Christie; Democrat, Independent, Republican. And it's all got to go: tenure, LIFO, automatic raises, the Triborough Amendment…the entire edifice will collapse under its own weight because people are finally paying attention.
Cue the caterwauling. It won't change the facts.
