Some Great Viewpoint on Corbett and Christie

This is a great article about two new, neighboring Governors.

Our region boasts one governor who vents entirely too much, and another who is so quiet, so circumspect on specifics, that his office is being compared to North Korea.

Governor Blowhard of New Jersey is voluble, bombastic, emotional, and unedited. He sounds like a Fox News commentator, while also being mentioned as a possible Republican presidential nominee, which often amounts to the same thing.

When Chris Christie was his state's U.S. attorney, he won convictions against more than 100 elected officials and public workers. Now that he's governor, he has bigger fish to fry, pursuing the nastiest, vilest, most overcompensated form of humanity. Bankers? Mobsters? No, teachers. "I don't understand why it is that I care more about those kids than they do," he said last week, attacking the teachers union, "but it's obvious that I do, because they don't want to change the system."

How Christie managed to gain traction attacking the very talent that draws so many residents to the state remains dumbfounding. New Jersey teachers are among the nation's best paid, averaging $66,600 annually, but many of its schools are among the best, too, befitting a state with a high median income and enviable graduation and literacy rates.

I couldn't agree more. New Jersey pays their teachers well, and gets results that fit with that- they had the best test scores in the nation as Christie announced his $800 million in cuts last year. Christie has refused to tax millionaires at the rate they were taxed at just a few years ago, but has had no problem cutting the money that teaches kids to read. It's unreal. This should be outraging people, but years of mismanagement in New Jersey have jaded people into evening accepting this yutz. Oh yeah, there's more.

Now, I happen to believe that teachers could contribute more of their income toward health care. Many of us already pay plenty. I just don't think you have to go to war to get there.

But that's not the dialogue we're having these days.

Well, with Pennsylvania's silent Tom Corbett, we're not having any dialogue.

While Corbett and Wisconsin's Scott Walker broadcast their intentions - indeed, Christie is a verbal pugilist incapable of keeping quiet - Pennsylvanians are greeted with the sounds of silence. It seems unfair that Governor Garbo has offered no suggestion as to what he plans to whack Tuesday when he announces his budget with $4 billion in spending cuts, except that it will hurt. As his budget secretary, Charles Zogby, says, "The day of reckoning has arrived."

Already, the commonwealth has made a devastating choice. Last week, adultBasic died for lack of support by the governor and legislature. AdultBasic was the bare-bones health-insurance safety net for Pennsylvanians, who paid as little as $36 a month. It cost the state a pittance to run. Launched in 2001 by Republican Govs. Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker, the program long enjoyed bipartisan support, because it was funded by a mammoth tobacco settlement and the state's healthy four Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance groups. The plan assisted people who weren't poor enough for Medicaid and not old enough for Medicare.

Ah yes, Governor Tom. She meant to say Corbett doesn't broadcast his intentions, and that's true. He just has basically stayed silent, and tried to insure that poor people lose health care that doesn't cost us anything, and of course that natural gas extractors pay no tax here, unlike every other natural gas state. To be clear about AdultBasic, it did not cost much in tax dollars. Tobacco settlements and the non-profit work required by law from "the Blues" in Pennsylvania funded this program.

The article lays out the reality that conservatives deny too.

AdultBasic covered 40,764 Pennsylvanians, almost two-thirds of them women, but the plan's true value was reflected in the enormous waiting list of residents craving coverage: more than half a million. That's one in every 24 state residents.

Last spring, when he was attorney general, Corbett joined the multistate suit against health-care reform while he was also running for governor (a common thread among the other attorneys general), going so far as to mail potential donors a fund-raising letter decrying "the health-care monstrosity." This would be the same attorney general who built his reputation indicting legislators who used their offices for political purposes.

In the wake of adultBasic's death, the Corbett administration suggested Pennsylvanians sign up with the Blues' Special Care policy, which costs $148 a month, four times as much as the killed program, while being less extensive, limiting subscribers to four doctor's visits a year. That's some plan: impossibly expensive and worse coverage.

Since fewer employers offer comprehensive health coverage, Pennsylvania runs the risk of having more uninsured residents, a cost that is passed on through overtaxed health systems, social services, and government entities, all of which face imminent budget cuts of their own.

Poor residents don't simply disappear into the ether because they lack coverage. They get sicker. And poor health is something we all pay for, just as poor schools become an untenable cost because they create an unprepared, underemployed, and uninsured workforce.

It's time we have a talk in America. Failure is more expensive than success. Sure, you can cut spending on education to the point that it has tangible, in classroom effects- and you'll spend more for the fact that you have an uneducated society. Sure, you can cut teacher compensation down to an "acceptable," "private-sector level," but qualified, smart people will not go down this road then, and we'll have worse teachers. Sure, you can cut government aid for health care for poor people, but those people will still get hurt and sick, and will go to the emergency room, and will therefore require payment for those services. Sure, you can sue the government to stop Health Care Reform, but reversion to the system we had before it's passage will only drive up costs, drive down administration of care, and continue to run our deficit higher. You can cut all the dollars from programs that help people if you want, but when those programs fail, you'll pay then too, and a lot more. If we're serious about budget deficits, we need a sensible revenue system in this nation, entitlement reform (not destruction), and curbing of our "security state" spending that grows by leaps and bounds each year. The answers being offered by the likes of Christie and Corbett are stupid, won't work, and will be harmful in the long term. It's death by a thousand cuts.

Let's Talk About Teachers' Pay For A Minute

Let's talk about being a teacher for a minute. I think we all agree it's an important job. Some of us say it'd be great to do, after all they get summers off. Some of us loathe the idea of trying to teach other peoples' kids. Either way, we agree it's important, and has it's challenges. I've done a little substituting in my day, and I can tell you it's tough.

Now, I'm going to speak broadly and generally for a minute, not to the laws of any one specific state. Teachers, broadly speaking, have to have a bachelor's degree of some kind, usually in education. In many states, they have to take course work post-graduation that is roughly equal to earning a master's degree. This puts teachers in the upper-echelons of being educated in this country. For most Americans, their educational level has a direct effect on their earnings levels. Earning more degrees means making more money.

In 2009, the average income, weekly, in the United States was $774 a week. The unemployment average level was 7.9%. People with a bachelor's degree, on the average, made $1,025 a week, and suffered through 5.2% unemployment. This works out to about $53,300 a year. As I stated above, teachers almost all have a bachelor's degree. The average weekly salary on a worker with a master's degree in this nation is $1,257. Over a year this equals out to $67,878 roughly, per year. Their unemployment rate is 3.9%. I include these unemployment numbers because in many states, teachers have been facing recent lay-offs, so it's worth noting. Most of these teachers fit into minimally the bachelor's category for education, and many have master's too.

Nationally speaking, teachers receive a median salary between $40,432 a year and $43,889, depending on their level of teaching. While certainly good enough to live on, that's not matching up with their education. In fact, this is a trend. In Wisconsin, where this controversy is hot right now, teachers start their salaries at $25,222, and average $46,390 a year. In Tennessee, where the legislature wants to strip them of collective bargaining rights, they start at $32,369, and average a salary of $42,537. In New Jersey, where Chris Christie has made it his mission to gut their contracts to nothing, teachers start at $38,408, and average a salary of $58,156. In Pennsylvania here, on the home front, teachers start at $34,976, and average a salary of $54,027.

Now, before someone twists those numbers around to say that Christie is right in New Jersey, it's worth noting that New Jersey gets what it pays for, good schools. In fact, at the point New Jersey was cutting $800 million from it's education spending, it was one of the top states on test scores in the country. The point isn't whether or not these are living wages- they are. The point is, based on educational background, nearly all teachers, on the average, are not compensated at the levels they should be. This isn't my opinion. It's statistical fact.

In Tennessee, The Assault On Teachers Begins

And the right-wing assault continues on unions:

The Senate Education Committee voted along party lines Wednesday to abolish collective bargaining between teachers unions and school boards across the state.
The vote was 6-3, with all Republicans on the panel voting for the bill and all Democrats against.

Sponsor Sen. Jack Johnson said passage of the bill -- SB113 -- will remove 'an albatross from around the neck of our school boards across the state' and remove a roadblock to education reform.

Here is a lesson in how to make sure your state stays red. Beat teachers up so bad that no one smart goes into teaching, so your kids don't learn any of that "evil" science, history, reading, and math. Then your kids will grow up so stupid that they believe the drivel coming out of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. And to think, it wasn't forever ago that Tennessee was a competitive state.