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It’s
elementary, really:
It’s about the money
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December 6, 2006
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The school teachers at Eisenhower Elementary
in Wauwatosa are hacked off their union hasn’t reached agreement yet
with the school board on a new contract. So they’ve been doing the
usual childish things like wearing black and moaning to the students
about how miserable their lives are and how unfair it is that they get
three months off in the summer, free health insurance and the ability to
retire with fat pensions while still in their mid-50s.
But somehow that wasn’t enough for the Wauwatosa Eisenhower teachers.
They wanted to make an even more attention-getting point. When they held
the recent parent-teacher conferences in school, they took the students’
artwork off the walls.
* * *
Voters in Menomonee Falls were dumb enough last month to vote for a huge
property tax increase for the schools. The school board says it needed
the money for a massive build-and-borrow campaign. A mere three weeks
after the election, flush with cash, the school board rewarded one of
the leaders of the tax hike push.
They gave the retiring director of business services, James Kennedy, a
$15,000 raise. But since Kennedy is retiring, giving him a raise seems
pointless, right? Not if scamming the taxpayers and lining your own
pockets are your prime motivations. By raising Kennedy’s salary, they
dramatically increased the annual pension he will receive until he dies.
Pensions are based on your highest annual salary and because of the
trick pulled with Kennedy’s salary, he’ll receive tens of thousands
more in his retirement if he lives a long life.
The story isn’t over. Not satisfied with their massive gift to
Kennedy, the Falls school board also gave him $55,000 in credits to buy
health insurance from the district. Believe it or not, there’s even
more. On top of the $55K and the higher pension, Kennedy was given a
lump sum check of $40,000! They called the payouts a
"severance" package. Severance? He’s retiring. They didn’t
fire him.
* * *
Teachers and public school administrators, in their constant whining for
more money, always cloak their arguments in concern for children.
"It’s for the kids!" is their constant mantra. But for most
of them, the kids are a tool – a piece of leverage – to be used to
enrich themselves. Tax hikes and school budgets don’t go for quality
education. They go to pay salaries and lavish benefits. And when it
comes time to negotiate a contract, the kids’ artwork is ripped off
the walls.
In the meantime, thousands of kids are exiled to hellholes called
Milwaukee public schools. Whenever efforts are made to liberate children
from those violent gang-infested dumps and place them in quality private
schools, the teachers union and administrators are the first to object.
They don’t care about the kids. They care about getting paid. They
care about their jobs.
* * *
Yet despite all of the pay, benefits and stunningly soft work schedules,
Wisconsin’s teachers unions continue to play the role of the
persecuted victim. For them, it’s never enough. No contract is
satisfactory. No grievance is unjustified. More, more, more, that’s
what they require. It’s for the kids, you know.
* * *
A social scientist named Arthur C. Brooks recently set out to determine
the political philosophies of America’s most and least generous
people. He checked everything from blood donations to financial
contributions to time spent volunteering for organizations. Like most
academic eggheads, Brooks expected liberals to be freer with their money
and more generous with their time. They, after all, always boast of
their compassion.
What Brooks found stunned him. He was so startled that he went back and
re-examined his methodology and conducted more surveys. The results were
the same. By every measure he used, conservatives were far more generous
than liberals. Conservatives not only donated more raw dollars but
greater percentages of their incomes than liberals. They donated more
time. They even donated more blood.
Brooks has published all this in a new book titled "Who Really
Cares." It was the subject of a recent column in this paper by the
esteemed Thomas Sowell. I wonder if Brooks was the first to undertake
this type of project or if others made the discovery earlier and didn’t
want to report it. Whatever the reason, it is stunning confirmation that
most liberals are hypocrites when it comes to compassion.
The great reward in being a liberal is the smug feeling of superiority
it conveys. Lefties love to advocate liberal solutions to problems
because it makes them feel compassionate. All they are really doing,
however, is throwing somebody else’s dollars around. When it comes to
actually doing some giving of their own, they are the ones who turn out
to be the cheapskates. Perhaps it is guilt over this that requires them
to get the warm little fuzzies received from advocating
"compassionate" solutions.
(Mark Belling is the host of a daily
WISN radio talk show and a Sunday television show. His column runs
Wednesdays in The Freeman.)
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