Teachers' Unions, Special Interest, Corporate Welfare and The Taxpayer.

We are at a very interesting place in this country right now because of the public discourse on so many social and fiscal issues and the increasingly apparent reality that we are becoming an impoverished nation. Despite efforts in the last twenty years to let free market systems drive down consumer prices through competition, to improve the quality of health care by shifting Medicare beneficiaries into the private insurance market, and all the supposed benefits of lower tax rates, our country has become poorer, further behind and less educated with each passing day. So what's the problem? The problem is that the myth that free-market capitalism and an economy driven by it benefits all the people who live in and depend upon that economy.

It is just a fact that the programs that have allowed the largest number of people to climb out of poverty, which helped create a middle class, that made this country strong in the aftermath of economic catastrophe and war during the early twentieth century were pro-labor and progressive programs built upon socialist philosophies. While corporate elite and the culture of conservatism have used the examples of dictatorships having no real relation to socialist philosophies to define those philosophies and the people who espouse them as radical, our country has benefited and come to depend upon socialism in order to thrive.

When I say progressive and pro-labor programs I mean labor unions, which are largely responsible for child labor laws, a forty hour work weak, health and retirement benefits, etc., Social Security, Medicare, and let's not forget about it, the Public School System. These are programs built on the idea that all people should be considered equal not just as political entities when it comes to voting, but as political entities in the way they are represented in labor disputes, in access to education and to opportunities that allow them to live out of poverty. They are built upon the principle that if you do work hard that you have the right to benefit with compensation and a right to improve your quality of life.

Public School especially is meant to everyone in this country to have access to an education no matter their background. Public schools were started as a means of giving people the opportunity to better their circumstances in the face of overwhelming disparities between them and those who control the environment of their labor. As our country has become increasingly diverse and as our population has grown the school system has become an increasing financial burden on the government and an increasingly complex system to manage. It has also been one of the most difficult fields to work in because while everyone demands quality education, they do not seem interested in making a legitimate commitment to financially and morally supporting those who those upon whom those demands are made.

Teachers have an incredibly difficult job. Not only has our culture become hostile towards education, and children raised in an environment of disrespect for the education system or for the need for and benefits of an education, but the responsibilities of teachers have increased with the increasing rates of poverty and stress in home environments. The conversation then becomes one of poorly performing teachers, of course which distracts from the many other issues plaguing the education system, not the least of which are the peripheral social issues that impact it so greatly. We see the effects of these peripheral issues so poignantly when we look at the disparity between the schools in poorer urban neighborhoods and those in wealthy suburbs. Somehow that comparison gets removed from the broader discourse as conservative politicians see an easy target for necessary spending cuts to offset their policies of tax cuts.

It is basic economics that you cannot spend more than you take in or you get a deficit. So the question becomes either 'why are you spending so much' or 'why aren't you making enough'. With conservative politics and politicians setting the tone of the discourse for the entire field of politics basically for the last thirty years, we have been stuck on that first question, and with the idea that somehow we have to cut out 'unnecessary' spending in order to sustain a healthy economy. One of the major problems with that is what is deemed unnecessary are always social programs that benefit the majority of the population. The reason for this is that it is politically expedient for a political movement in which evangelical Christianity partnered with corporate interests for the sake of overcoming the political party actually concerned with the general welfare of working people.

Because Scott Walker is trying to bust public unions, and because it has been the vanguard of a movement by conservative politicians throughout the Great Lakes region and elsewhere, it has constantly been in the news. Recent polls say that the majority of people in Wisconsin as well as the majority of people in this country favor unions and collective bargaining rights. This is in spite of the fact that the governor and his colleagues have made a vociferous case to their citizens of blaming public workers, who are of course part of the evil big government conspiracy to control the lives of regular people. This is a symptom, of course, of the 'big government' versus 'little government' argument and that somehow smaller government translates to greater financial security for the individual.

The problem with that is that most Americans depend on and take for granted the things that larger government provides, such as fixing roads and providing emergency services, not to mention Social Security and Medicare. The people most dependent on Social Security, the people it was initially set up to benefit, were the people without the means to save for their own eventual retirement. This is still true. People who depend most on the program are those whose jobs didn't offer pensions or retirement accounts and who weren't able to invest in a retirement plan on their own. Many Americans fall into this category. Something similar is true for Medicare where the beneficiaries are mostly people who no longer work and receive health benefits from their employer and who can't afford or don't qualify for private insurance. Ironically, in 2010 when polls were exploring the phenomenon of the Tea Party, those two programs were the two things people absolutely refused to give up or take cuts in. In fact they thought we should see increases in these programs. Those programs make up two-thirds of the national budget.

Corporations, however, don't have any interest in the public welfare or social programs. Because they are entities whose purpose is to make money, because they benefit from an uneducated population that can be paid little and either don't know they have potential for higher compensation or the right to ask for it, and because they need targets for cutting spending to offset their lack of tax responsibility, public employees and especially teachers become easy targets. One of the arguments, though, has some merit, since an employer needs to be financially stable in order to provide jobs and pay salaries and benefits.

Because of the economic crisis this has been difficult. Because corporations seek greater and greater gains each quarter and regard that as a mark for the health of their companies, especially when it is a signal to investors as to whether to invest in the company or not, they need to find ways to cut costs as a means of boosting profits. If a company can't do that in one area they may move to another area, and that means that large corporations can threaten to leave a state and that threat is real because they have the leverage of many jobs to use against politicians. Because we've created an economy dependent on large publicly financed corporations rather than a diversified base of private companies we have allowed them to dictate the terms of their own regulation and legal responsibilities. We don't hold them accountable at all for making threats like this, nor for cutting and running when they see they can make more money by moving somewhere else.

Thus Republicans can make the argument that tax cuts for corporations are necessary, that they create or retain jobs, along with their general ideology of lower taxes all in concert with shrinking government. A necessary component of this is cutting spending, then. Public sector employees are a politically expedient sacrifice on both fronts, and especially teachers since education of children is a very emotional issue for most people and the quality of education in our country has been seen as a problem for some time. Dissatisfied parents then vote for people who identify the teachers as the problem with the system since teachers are for parents the most immediate face of the system.

The overall disaster with all of this is that education suffers when teachers are laid off and class sizes increase. That means fewer students succeed and then fewer become productive and skilled workers and our general labor force and the citizenry as a whole becomes less educated. Less educated people make fewer demands for their own rights and welfare and thus perpetuate a system where they are taken advantage of for the benefit of someone else. Usually this results in a small, very wealthy population, and a large portion of the population who are poor, without much in between.

Because our population is aging, and the bulge in the population are people of the 'baby boomer' generation, I can understand why Social Security and Medicare are such priorities and how the rhetoric of 'cutting taxes' in the interest of saving more money is attractive. The question is, are you really saving more money when you have lower taxes? Does it really benefit you and your community?

Average wages for the general work force who earn less than $250K has only risen by 2% over the last thirty years, while the average earnings for those above that mark have skyrocketed. All this time prices have increased everywhere. There is an incredible amount of financial burden placed on consumers and the shrinking Middle Class. Especially in the past ten years this has been during a time when we have supposedly been benefiting from the savings of tax cuts. So when are those benefits going to kick in?

In a free market system tax cuts are the answer to everything. But if a business can save more money via tax cuts why would they hire more people? Especially if they are a company which produces nothing except financial instruments like investments that don't exist except on paper and are almost entirely the province of the already wealthy? In a free market system competition is supposed to be able to solve the problems in the health care industry, by driving down insurance premiums and improving the quality of care, but the goal of the insurance industry is not to pay out benefits, but to make money. It only benefits when people are paying their premiums and when fewer and fewer people can afford private insurance where there is no collective ability to choose among competitors for the best price, they will have to raise the cost of premiums to cover that loss.

Plus, we have already seen deregulation of industries, such as the banking industry, and the result was a melt-down of our economy. financial institutions took on high risk investments with high yields because they made money very quickly. The same was true before the Great Depression in the credit industry. That is why those regulations that were more recently loosened were put in place. Loosening them was supposed to help stimulate business and give corporations the opportunity to create more jobs, but in the meantime we've seen not just manufacturing jobs go away. Many of us have seen the call-center and customer service jobs disappear as well over the last ten or fifteen years. Manufacturing has been disappearing for decades, but those white-collar jobs that were staples for college graduates everywhere are gone now too, and they are not coming back.

Corporations don't have an interest in creating jobs. Because their shills, who are mostly Republicans, have dominated the discourse over the last thirty years, they have been allowed to dictate to us the means by which we govern ourselves. The conflict comes when we are asked to make noticeable sacrifices and when those sacrifices infringe on values so fundamental that they are nearly universal. These values may not be expressed in the same way by all people, but they are realized in programs like Social Security, Medicare and Public Education. We should refuse to accept sacrifices when it comes to education.

The question shouldn't then be 'why are we spending so much'. The question is, why aren't we taking in enough? And I'm not talking about income tax, that just puts more of the burden on individual citizens. The question is, and especially after the financial meltdown that brought to light the staggering amounts of money made by financial institutions and corporations, why aren't corporations putting in their fair share. Most corporations have philanthropic divisions that do good work in helping to support communities, but for the most profitable businesses, that money isn't much more than PR to cover up the lack of real investment by many of companies in the communities of consumers they sell their products to. It means nothing to a corporation that hands out $10 million or even $100 million a year when their end of year profits are in the $10's of billions over and above whatever expenditures they take on, including that philanthropy.

To ask them to shoulder some of the tax burden for programs that most Americans depend on doesn't amount to a big sacrifice. Getting them to pay up when so many Americans have voted in ignorance for the party that greedily takes advantage of the money of those corporate interests is something else entirely.