Sophistry is always in generous supply but today we seem to have a bumper crop of it. I can only conclude that’s a result of the prosaic observation that if you subsidize something you get more of it. Robert Samuelson’s Washington Post contribution to the strategic sophistry supply is:
To those paying attention, the recent strikes for higher teachers’ pay in West Virginia and Oklahoma are a harbinger of things to come. You can attribute the strikes to the stinginess of the states’ political leaders. After all, average annual teachers’ salaries in these states ranked, respectively, 49th-lowest (Oklahoma at $45,276) and 48th-lowest (West Virginia, $45,622) in 2016, reports the National Education Association. But that’s the superficial explanation. The deeper cause is that teachers — and schools — are competing with the elderly for scarce funds.
Once again that is a half truth. A more complete truth is that present government workers are competing with retired government workers for funds. That’s an inevitable problem when the growth assumptions required to maintain the solvency of public employee pension funds are 7% or even 8% and actual growth is more like 2%.
The sad truth is that we are about 20 years late in reforming government pension plans.
Meanwhile, I think that the states that pay the lowest wages to teachers need to adjust themselves to the reality that they’ll need to pay more. Paying starting teachers the median wage might be a good start.
That means either raising taxes while at the same time still under federal court orders to improve prisons, state mental institutions, donors wanting tax breaks, boondoggles to fund, etc or going blind. Not a fun time to be a state legislator.
which explains why Illinois’s legislators do little or nothing at all and collect a salary for not doing it. Why, you can’t even sexually harass your interns any more.
I can’t speak for states other than Illinois but nearly all of Illinois’s spending is for public employee pensions, Medicaid, or wages of present state employees. Everything else is a much smaller fraction.
Heh. Bet Illinois voters go hard Democratic……again. Not my problem anymore, but my condolences.
As long as there are 50 states one of them is going to be 48th and another is going to be 49th. What this polemic omits is the cost of living in these states. Oklahoma is at 89.2 of national median and WV is 95.9.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://www.missourieconomy.org/images/indicators/cost_of_living/col4q17_map1.jpg&imgrefurl=https://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/&h=773&w=1000&tbnid=deZ8eUu2CxJIOM:&tbnh=160&tbnw=207&usg=__ZoU_A3AHBWSCVONUVIdZa0df5eA%3D&vet=1&docid=Z1GqHd3Os1Wi1M&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP1-bup67aAhVvU98KHbJaDZkQ9QEILzAA