Hoping I don't get killed for this comment, but if you are talking about our current administration, my husband says they are one and the same!
I don't think you'll get much of an argument on that one! The only ones I know who still support Obama are teachers.
I'm sure the wage scale must be substantially different in Florida than it is in NY. Someone that works approximately six hours a day for 180 days a year and makes a salary of over $90,000 per year with benefits worth about another $60,000 with a guaranteed retirement account and guaranteed job security and who constantly complains about how tough they have it doesn't get a lot of sympathy from me. To quote a teacher who came into my office this year "There is no way they should put this recession on the backs of the teachers!" My only response has to be WHY NOT? That teacher and many others have no concept of reality and what the rest of us have to do to survive in this world. Perhaps your teachers don't have quite the benefits that we are paying for here. Would you be happy to know that your tax dollars are going to pay for plastic surgery riders on your teachers' health insurance? Of that if a teacher gets the right breaks they can move into administration and maybe even become a school superintendent and follow in the footsteps of a local administrator who has a retirement pay of over $250,000 per year. Sorry, but that is just plain abusive. And how they got to this point is by buying off politicians. Do you see where I might lack a great deal of sympathy for the downtrodden teachers?
rdubnpk If the educators where you live are making enough to buy off politicians, I guarantee you they are doing much better than down here in the South.
The South is notoriously bad pay for teachers. I know NC is getting up closer to the scale up North, but it still has a ways to go. I have had teachers say to me "Noone dares to stand up to the teachers' union!" And they are right. The teachers' union here is NY is incredibly powerful and they make multi million dollar contributions to various politicians. Their members are quite often told who to vote for. It is a bad situation here. The impression they give to the general public is that they are beyond the law. They can do whatever they want and there is no repercussion to be had. I find it scary to have my kids taught by people that think they are beyond the law. Are there good teachers? Absolutely and they should be well compensated. My problem is that there is no mechanism to get rid of bad teachers. They just linger and linger until they draw their retirement and we still are paying for them decades after they retire. When someone feeds at the public trough, the public has a right to complain about how much they eat!
rdubnpk Thought all of you good Repubs would be happy to hear that, according to an article in the newspaper this morning, the rich seem to be unhampered by the slowed economy. Aided by those additional tax breaks you were adament that they be allowed to keep, the Jaguars are still flying off the show room floors and the Versaces are still flying off the shelves. The rest of us, though, seem to be continuing to suffer from the ever-increasing gas prices which are driving up the costs of everything else, even at Wal-Mart, where we are forced to shop in order to try and save a few bucks. The gap between rich and poor, in the meantime, is continuing to widen.
I have seen that gap widen over the last 12 years or so. Within my own practice I'm seeing those that make over $100,000 per year seeing their income go up, those between $50,000 and $100,000 staying about even and those below $50,000 going backwards. It is not a good situation and one that seems to result in class warfare moreso than real solutions. My cure for it would be to reduce the giveaways on the lower end and increase taxes on the upper end. Both sides are going to have to give if we are ever going to see this deficit crisis end. Noone wants to change their piece of the pie and try to make sure there is a pie there in the future. So sad that we have become such a "me, me and mine" society that we fail to see the full picture.
