Welfare was pared back because it didn’t achieve its desired effect, which was stimulating the low-skilled labor class. So we ended up removing it. It may have helped some people, but in the end it was shown to be overall ineffective. If the stimulus you’re proposing takes that long, it will, in the long run, probably result in the same thing. Maybe worse, like the UK’s public school system. I can’t stress enough how throwing money at the problem, be it through direct subsidy or through inflation, isn’t the right way to make a better home.

If you’re proposing this on a local level, I have a hard time imagining enough votes for it. It would have to be state or federal level to make any real stimulative effect. As a general rule I think we should avoid income redistribution between people who won’t know each other. Bring back the Friendly Societies. These have been very successful in the past and we still have some today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_society

But all through history, when technology improves, low-skilled labor is always displaced. The trend has been for those laborers to take on higher-skilled work because A) prices are lower, which saves money so B) businesses can hire the displaced labor to do new things. The unemployment rate has always jittered between roughly 2% and 8%. So 92% to 98% of our labor force has been displaced at some time, and they’ve still picked up new skills to find work. People are resilient. You might argue it’s due to the government. I disagree, and that’s never a good movie plot.

What about how Clinton shut down welfare? It can be done; it just has to be packaged in a way that helps people understand that it’s for the common good. Again, I’m not sure how to make it sustainable. Does this mean that everyone should aim for white collar work?

White collar work is higher-paid work because the definition of white-collar work is that it’s more productive than blue-collar work. If it were more productive to work with your hands than to sit at a computer, then an assembly line worker would earn more than a robotic arm designer.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/24/rhode.island.teachers/index.html?hpt=T2

The median income in this district is $22k. Most of these teachers make $72k and $78k. Oi. I actually think the problem is the $22k, not the $72k. Still, it sounds a bit greedy to be asking for additional compensation when the graduation and proficiency rates are so low.

Good point, but isn’t there a price point where people get content where they are? Take, for example, an engineering firm or a software firm. Some people just like programming and don’t feel like managing people. The pay is less, but does one really feel stress if one makes, say, $80k a year vs. $100k? I know quite a few programmers who hate dealing with other people.

Eric,

I’m coming into this with the idea that it may or may not be sustainable. However, boosting the salaries of people wouldn’t just raise property values. It would improve all parts of life.

It’s been more or less proven that the best schools have lots of parental involvement. If parents weren’t so busy working two or three jobs just to make ends meet, maybe they’d have more time to get involved with their children’s school. There would be more money, more parental involvement, and less stressful family lives. Kids would be able to afford books. Kids would have more food on the table, thereby ensuring that they would be able to concentrate on schoolwork.

I don’t know if white collar workers are more productive. I’ve known some really, really useless white collar types. When you have a computer and internet, it’s easy to be useless. Although I will say that I’ve met some lazy blue collar types as well.

You’re talking about a way to “create” money by artificially raising property prices, and thus derive more tax money to channel into local schools. I don’t see how this benefits the “right” people, since you’ll be incentivizing laborers to enroll in this new welfare program that subsidizes their work. But by its nature it can’t enroll everyone, and those who aren’t enrolled face higher property taxes. So it’s a wash.

Additionally, people who are only marginally white-collar workers would be incentivized to take up a less skilled, blue-collar job. If the person’s new blue-collar salary + labor subsidy is greater than their white-collar salary, then they switch to blue-collar labor. We’ve just subsidized less productive work.

You could cut out some bureaucracy by just taking the labor subsidy and plugging it straight into the school, which would make it more cost-effective, but we do this already. So your idea is basically a budget increase with more bureaucracy. It’s still just moving money around a system that is already terribly inefficient. Adding more programs and more administrators to the pile results in a bigger version of the problem we already have.

King, good point about administrators. The only thing I might say is that some teachers get paid very well. Not all, but some. Think about it: $72k as a teacher in a POOR school? That’s probably more than twice the household income as some of the students. Plus they work nine months a year, without that extra 25 minutes that Steve Perry mentioned.

This same problem exists in many businesses, people who are truly good at a job must leave that job and become a manager in order to move up to the next tier of compensation. But, of course, being a teacher and being in charge of other teachers is a totally different skill set. Just like being a good salesman and being in charge of 20 salesman is totally different.

This is patently illogical. Compensation and authority are not the same thing, and are not even naturally related. If you have a teacher who is great as a teacher, pay them a great salary. If there is someone who is good at managing people, then give them authority and responsibility doing just that. Leave good teachers in the classroom, and hire good administrators to manage people. And if it happens that a really excellent teacher makes more than the principal or administrators… so what??

P.S.
Bad teachers should, of course, be fired!