If there was not the possibility of a worker revolution backing up those battles, they still would not have won. Post WW2 the unions were pressured to purge the Communists from their ranks. Had management still not conceded to unions this purge would have been in vain, and there would have been millions of restive workers receptive to a CP message instead of happy workers paid enough to enter the middle class. Had workers in the late 40s been treated like they are now by Walmart et al, there would have been blood in the streets. Europe dealt with the postwar situation by electing socialist governments, we dealt by empowering the unions which in turn provided the social safety nets that the socialists were offering.
And the decline of unions dates to the late 70’s not the mid 50’s.
Again, you have just about everything wrong. The 2003 survey was “conducted in respondents’ homes,” not from a mail-in questionnaire as you say.
From 1992 to 2013, the population increased about 13%, the survey size increased from 26,000 to 36,000, a 39% increase. (Not that it had to be that much, in order to maintain the same error bars, etc, the sample size has to increase much more slowly – something like 1/√population.) So your 1992 survey was less comprehensive by any measure, the opposite of what you claim.
In any event, to claim that the measure is not fake news is to also say that the US population is 256,000 people because what’s a couple of decades difference, right?
Notice that the statement at the top of the page is in the present tense. But it is based on statistics from a generation ago.
Slightly OT, but I have found that this is one of the hardest things for those same working poor (and up into middle class) to wrap their heads around: that some of the richest people can avoid paying (many) taxes by the simple fact that they don’t really have an income. We equate rich with making lots of money. Really it’s just having lots of money.
That doesn’t apply to elementary school students or even high school students. There’s no prestige that comes with graduating from sixth grade, and very little that comes with a GED. And when we’re talking about functional illiteracy, those are the relevant milestones, not postgraduate degrees that you have framed and hung on the wall of your private practice and can subtly humblebrag about at wine & cheese parties.
I don’t follow you at all. I agree the idea that income worked for is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains is absurd, and been the best sign of who owns our government. But property tax is the closest thing we have to a wealth tax, which is the ideal tax. Most wealth is liquid and hard to tax, but land can’t be offshored.
As far as I can tell the popularity of paying for schools via property tax is that it allows cover for funding affluent districts much more than poorer ones. In NJ this has been the subject of a decades long lawsuit and consent decree, The Abbott Decision, that funneled state money to poorer districts. As could be predicted, there a lot of unintended consequences, such Hoboken, gentrified since the decision and now very wealthy, still being a recipient of Abbott funding allowing it to have a relatively low tax rate, while other poorer districts that weren’t in the original Abbott list get nothing. It suffers from the same disease as Obamacare, the inability to just toss the existing system and start fresh.
Most of the students I’ve seen are like this, and these are upper middle class kids. They don’t want to do the work, they just want to get the A that they’re entitled to so they can get the jobs their parents had and that they’re entitled to. Not interested in learning in the slightest, and they would only get pissy at me for making them work.
You would love teaching in my kids HS, a test-in magnet in a city with a 39% foreign born population. These kids are hugely motivated, no entitlement to be seen.
You’ve followed my notion pretty well. Basically, in this rare example of a case where funding social costs through taxation of work rather than assets might be completely reasonable, we don’t do it.
@gellfex, the topic closed before I answered your question below, but basically income taxes are national and/or statewide, while property taxes are not. That’s my whole point. Note the equivocal language I used, too.
But I’m not following that. Ideally schools should be funded by a Statewide or even national tax and funded equally, with a local cost-of-living variation. So what makes this a better case for income rather than wealth tax?
And in this discussion, I think it is an important observation.
I am not saying it is the students’ fault. I have no idea how to correct the problem. I think it is a world-wide problem and not specific to the USA. I noticed it concern all societal classes, maybe with an emphasis on the more entitled classes. All this is very different than what is classically written about poor studying skills. I think it is an important observation. That is all.
But redlining means that the districts with expensive white real estate get good funding for the public schools while districts with poor black real estate get virtually no funding at all.
If public education funds were extracted from local real estate taxes but distributed per (student) capita at the state level, that I could get behind.
Sorry, I didn’t make it clear that while I pulled out the one quote to respond to it directly, I was in the end agreeing that a change to statewide distribution was the right move.
Ah. Don’t get your hopes up, it seems that no matter where they try this the forces of inequality reign no matter what. In NJ school funding is like Obamacare, all the patches on a broken system still leave a pile of crap.
The sad thing is that even when you do pour money into urban systems like Jersey City and Newark, between the usual entrenched urban social problems and the corrupt school systems it vanishes without a trace of good.
