Education should be extremely well compensated. There's a host of reasons why it's a good idea to pay teachers the way doctors, lawyers and engineers are paid; but it all comes down to wanting the best and brightest working in education, because kids getting a shitty education decreases the country's ability to produce bright people, whereas kids getting a good education increases the country's overall intelligence.
Instead, those people work on ads. Idiocracy thought it'd be the cosmetics industry. Turns out…
We can have a discussion about increasing the minimum training for teachers to be additional years + a PhD. I'm sure this would naturally increase the quality of teaching and also increase the market rate for teachers since there are less people who are qualified.
We can also discuss raising salaries if the school simply cannot find enough teachers.
It doesn't make as much sense to say we should simply increase the pay of teachers if there is a huge backlog of qualified applicants.
I believe SF is having a teacher shortage, so for that reason, it makes sense to increase teacher pay. But I think too often people make moralistic arguments for government pay but free market arguments for everyone else.
Or, someone might reasonably think that teachers play only one part in educational outcomes, and that investing more in teaching quality isn't an efficient use of resources.
Or maybe both those people are wrong. But it's hardly dangerous to entertain the complaints of the people paying the bills.
They simply want the high salaries with no responsibly to produce results.
Why?
paying less taxes doesn't imply that the gov't ceases to exist. The gov't has no competition, so every entity within the gov't has every incentive to increase their own revenue by maximally expending tax dollars.
It is up to the people paying taxes to reduce it, as a counter-balancing force, and hold the spending efficiency to a good standard.
It’s a revenue stream for governments, sure, but how much revenue a government needs is determined by what policies a government has in place, their obligations to pay employees and officers, and what additional services the government offers. The politics is all around that stuff, but a tax is still a taking of the money that someone else earned to pay for all that, including to pay public employees.
That’s also irrelevant because that doesn’t address what a tax is, or how it ended up in a government’s treasury, or why it is there in the first place.
These people are underpaid. We have every right to expect the best in these positions, why are we not paying for it?
Also, I don't see why it's unfair to call a teacher or firefighter overpaid. If you work for a private business, nobody else knows or cares about your salary. But when you work for government, every taxpayer has a right to complain. Especially for taxpayers who make less than the government position.