That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.
But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.
That is not true, given that I was replying to you, and you were replying to the person that said _this_.
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.
That being said, in some places the teachers make good money when you include their pension; in other places they do not. It's not consistent across the country.
> You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total
That was not my intent. My intent was to indicate...
If you think that teachers make enough when you include their pension, you can't complain that their pension causes a hardship early in their career; because the choice of a pension is likely not something they'd be willing to give up". If you think the pension causes a hardship earlier in the career and that that needs to be changed, then either 1) You do _not_ believe teachers make enough including their pensions, OR 2) You think pensions should be done away with (which I doubt will be supported by the teachers/union).
a) Oops! Not sure why I thought that diognesofsinope's comment and your comment were written by the same person, my bad.
b) You've either made the same mistake I did or you've excellently satirised my mistake, as you were replying not to me but to somebody else :P
So fair enough, sorry I thought your comment that I replied to was the owner of the original belief that salaries + pensions = enough currently, and then expanding on that belief.
You'll have to learn to live on a low salary for the first 5-10 years of your career. But pensions are paid based on your terminal salary, not your average salary. For elementary school teachers in my district the terminal salary was in excess of $100k as of 2017.
While that may be true, it's important to note that the pension is only salary (and usually only 80% of your terminal salary) and not benefits.
So you'd spend a significant part of that money on getting health insurance.
Most teachers who have earned full pensions wait to retire until 67 anyway so they can get Medicare (and not Social Security, because they don't qualify for it since they have their pension unless they worked another job as well).
My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked).
Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.
But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroom, and with the hours she worked, she was basically make $3/hr, despite getting some of the highest teacher pay in the country.
And all of her coworkers were in the same boat -- almost every one of them, even the senior teachers, were married to engineers. The few that weren't either had family money or at least had parents who bought them a condo or house. Or a good friend. We let one of her young teacher friends live with us for a couple years until she managed to save up enough for a down payment on a small condo, and then got married and got a second job.
It is basically impossible to be a teacher in Silicon Valley without a highly paid spouse or multiple side hustles.
The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.
I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.
Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions...
(We can't, and we don't.)
[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.
If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.
The public sector employees getting generous retirement packages are not the enemy. They are not the reason the rest of us are getting pissed on and told it's raining. That's the very wealthy and the politicians they've bought.
If anyone wants in on it, IT at a large public sector university.
Counter-points to that:
You still have to pay the bills before retirement.
And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):
* https://vtdigger.org/2021/01/17/painful-cuts-proposed-in-pen...
In various Canadian provinces teachers get decent salaries and good pensions: why can't US states do the same?