Death sentences Kemp

Wait! I have it! We can sell them as slave labor to China!

But a hundred million Chinese do!

But you can't survive without a babysitter!

Hmmm

The #7 is legal in most states..........

I love government worker unions. Even socialists acknowledge they're impossible to manage, and here we are.

Sometimes it's next to impossible and you get paid to sit in a room and think about touching kids for 40 years! Then a full pension! w00t w00t I <3 my union

Clearly East does not know of the New York education system where it is easier to put a teacher in an empty room for 8 hours a day than to fire him.

The teachers never quit either. They all go into the room for the huge pay and benefits. They retire in the room... to huge pensions.

None can be fired.

I'm not demonizing humane things unions fought for decades ago, but there's absolutely no parallel between those actions and the bilking of the taxpayer that goes on today with public employee unions. I have an alternative to unions for government workers: If you don't like the conditions/pay/benefits, go find a real job in the private sector.

The more bloated these public employee unions benefits get because of union-government collusion to steal from taxpayers, the harder it is to find real jobs in the private sector because they're squeezed with additional taxes to pay for the union-government theft.

$50k is pretty good for someone with a bachelor degree. Most can expect to earn something closer to $35k after they graduate.

"Teachers are paid well? Compared to a manual laborer, maybe... If $50k is a lot for someone with a grad degree then I fail to see the benefit of higher education."

This is handled locally. So yes, in some areas. Not at all, in other areas. Obviously, objections to teacher pay (as a small group among government employees/gov't employee unions) are objections to those areas in which teachers are payed ridiculously well.

In the area I grew up, teachers maxed out their pay raises and pensions (minus inflation/cost of living increases) in 17 years. For only an undergraduate degree, this was over $80,000/year. Many would transfer to another district after 17 years in order to get 2 full pensions. This is in the late '90s when I went to highschool.

$80,000 something for having a BA (in the '90s) with short hours, 0 manual labor, no holiday work, and summers off is getting a little ridiculous. Those with more education got paid significantly more.

If you don't understand math, numbers, or the fact that real people have to live with less because these salaries, benefits, and pensions are all taxed out of them, you might have no problem with teachers with BAs getting $80+k/yr for their limited work year. In some areas teachers really aren't payed well. In other areas they're payed even more than what I've outlined from my experience above.

The point is that many public employees make far more (counting benefits and pensions) than their private sector counterparts, have greater job security, have little accountability, and compete with no one. This is silly and hurts everybody. The end.

"And why are capital gains taxes evil?"

1) Capital gains investments and income benefit everyone, even without any tax on capital gains income.
2) Capital gains investments much more efficiently direct capital toward efficient investments and real progress than government "investments," which are often just payoffs for political support and contributions and propaganda.
3) Capital gains investments risk only the money of investors choosing to make educated gambles on companies. Not only are investments more efficient than government ones (#2 above), but they don't take money from anyone who would rather spend it elsewhere in order to make those investments.

1) Investments resulting in capital gains income require first that the investor risked his/her own money. Second, they require that their investment resulted in a positive impact on a company (job creation, training, expansion, development, research, etc) resulting in increased profits/valuation. In order for an investor to make money, their investment has had to increase the profits (and taxation) of a company. Even without any "capital gains" tax rate, capital gains investments already directly increase tax revenues. Capital gains investments (and capital gains income) are desirable and beneficial for the entire economy and the poorest among us whether they're taxed at all or not--and this includes tax revenues.

Capital gains taxes disincentivize this form of investment. They shrink margins and encourage investment elsewhere (often in other countries where we get 0% tax). Because this form of investment is desirable and benefits the whole of society, we obviously want to incentivize it and not chase it off-short and outside of our borders.

Additionally, capital gains taxes reduce the pool of money most investors are [relatively] immediately putting back into the market to make more investments. If investors are taxed less, they have more money to invest in more companies (yay capitalism), resulting in more hiring, more expanding, more research, more development, more innovations, better products, cheaper products, etc. If investors are taxed more, the government has more money to waste on cowboy poetry festivals and million dollar Las Vegas conventions for government bureaucrats who already own convention halls.

2) Investors are motivated to invest in worthy individuals/companies and results in worthy individuals/companies having access to capital they need to grow/expand/develop/hire/etc. This is the free market at its finest, directing money toward worthy causes and avoiding wasting money at a much better rate than any government has remotely approached.

3) Money lost is investor capital which was willingly invested (said investor capital likely split and profiting overall) and lost, NOT tax money taken from everyone, including those who could use a few more bucks to make ends meet, pay the rent, pay the water bill, electricity bill, fill up the gas tank, buy the kids new clothes, put food on the table, etc etc etc.

It's moral, efficient, and pragmatic to tax capital gains less than regular "income." Working my day job, I don't risk any money, nor do I necessarily create jobs/better products/increased profits. Investors making money in the form of capital gains do risk money, and they are necessarily creating jobs/better products/increased profits.

Let's presume you asked why capital gains taxes are undesirable/less desirable than other taxes. And let's hope that now you have a decent idea.

Short hours? No. No competition? No. Teachers spend long hours, much more than the run-of-the-mill 9-5, to prepare curriculum, teach, grade papers, submit repots, etc. and they are hardly without competition, especially since there are major discrepancies in compensation between different school districts. BA teachers are now rare (about a third of the teachers at my old high school had doctorates) and seldom do better than teaching elementary/middle schools, where pay is generally low. 17 years of work for $80k is unimpressive; someone with a master-level professional degree can make easily twice that amount, if not more, if he is as hard-working as a teacher. In any case, teachers' pay seldom exceed the average income of the private-sector workers in their school district, since the education budget (and teachers' pay) comes from local taxes (usually property) and is voted on by the local population, the vast majority of whom are not government employees.

And fundamentally, to think that we should reduce incentives for a job that is already having a hard time attracting talent and cut funding on education--the bedrock of any successful economy and stable society--hurts the vast majority of the population that cannot afford a posh private-school education and is just silly. The end.