They’re all history teachers now, because we’ve known for well over a century how workers get ahead. It’s not by deregulation, tariffs, or special tax privileges.
Effing AP, as usual on this story. How about “raises that would bring their income back to 2008 levels”
One of the more shocking aspects of public education is the fact that schools are often the ONLY place kids can go to get a guaranteed meal! Both of my parents were public school teachers in a poor area, and they observed that most of their students came to school for the free breakfast and lunch.
Spare me the Republican gibberish about small government, family values, and personal responsibility! Where the hell are these kids parents, and why are they ignoring the responsibility of feeding their own kids, but then voting for these jerk-off Republicans to prevent this!?
Without the diligence of teachers who are the real boots on the ground advocates for young people, millions of kids would go hungry. Fact!
For a lot of the parents, they’re not ignoring the responsibility of feeding their own kids, they’re just trying to figure out how to get through the month. But yeah, some of them are then turning right around and voting for the devil.
Yeah, times get tough, but WHAT could precede the responsibility feeding your OWN children, ESPECIALLY if you consistently use your vote to attack public schools and teachers!?? Astounding.
There’s a mindset among a certain kind of conservative that they’re entitled to government aid in a way that other people aren’t. So they take the money (or the aid) because obviously they deserve it, but that doesn’t shake their conviction that the gummint is evil. (The extreme version is the fundy-mormon “starve the beast” welfare fraud, but I think there’s a long gamut short of that.)
Yup, they’ve “earned” it, unlike all those cheating welfare frauds.
I worked for a short while in Merced (Central California farming country, think Devin Nunes supporters, but a little farther north) and one day at the dog park got into a conversation with an older gentleman, who just couldn’t resist ranting on about all them libruls at the local university. Well, since I worked at that local university I decided to explore his objections. It was all about gummit waste of “his tax dollars”.
“Well, what do you do for a living, sir?”
Yeah, had been in the military, then worked for a long time as a nurse’s aide at the VA hospital.
“Oh, so you’re a government worker?”
Absolutely not! He was a veteran.
“But but if you’d agree with government welfare, why should my tax dollars pay your social security and pension, then?”
No! He’d paid into those plans, it was his money!
“But what about those other people who were paying into social security?”
I just didn’t get it - he was a veteran!
I stopped after a while, and concluded that people like him were unreachable until it got so screwed up that it would personally affect them. Selfishness has become a virtue - very sad state of affairs.
Personally, I think the mistake we made back in the '60s was to conclude that we needed to do away with shaming. It was true that it was being misused to keep in place some poor pieces of society but we let a whole lot of folks become publicly proud of their selfishness. Time to reclaim it and repurpose it, I think…