Pay Teachers?
I was reading Infidel 753's link roundup for this week, an essential read for me, when I came across the following map. It shows teacher salaries in the United States:
Too tempting to resist comparing it to this one:
Blue State vs. Red State
Just a coincidence, I guess.
Comments
...whether she now going to be offered a gun with a raise.
I suspect the better pay situation in Georgia compared to its neighbors is due to the Atlanta metro area, which is turning the state purple little by little.
A comment about paying people not to grow crops: During World War I, American agricultural production was vastly increased to meet the demands of Europe, where war was leaving a lot of agricultural capacity unusable. Incidentally, a consequence of this was the putting to the plow of large areas of previously unfarmed and relatively poor areas of the Great Plains. This was a major contribution to the dust bowl of a decade or so later.
Anyway, after the end of the war, the country was left with a massive agricultural oversupply, which resulted in a collapse of agricultural prices, precipitating a total depression in the farming sector by the early 1920's. As you might expect, the response of the three Republican administrations in the 1920's, under the influence of treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, one of the world's richest and greediest men, was to concentrate its relief efforts one hundred percent on bailing banks out of their bad loans to farmers, leaving the farmers with no relief whatsoever. This guaranteed that the agricultural depression would continue unabated, reaching a point in the late 1920's where (in a now totally forgotten series of incidents) the government was concerned about the very real possibility of a revolution.
So, the farmers continued without aid until the Democrats took over in 1933. At that point, it was abundantly clear that the only answer to the problem was to decrease the amount of land in production. Since they had no luck (for obvious reasons) convincing individual farmers to give up their own production in order for their neighbors to make more money, the Roosevelt administration adopted the only strategy that was guaranteed to work: simply paying people to leave land fallow. This did indeed produce a stabilization in agricultural prices, and ended the desperate state that had existed in American agriculture since the early twenties. Of course, it naturally produced a Conservative response similar to Reagan and the "welfare mothers," where the few cases of, say, people getting paid these subsidies to turn agricultural land into golf courses, were made representative of the whole, and the tremendous good it did was utterly ignored.