Senator Nelson,
Before you get started debating the positives (there aren't any) for bailing out up to 300,000 teachers with my money let me give you my input.
Teacher pensions are the underlying problem, not lost revenue from exorbitant property tax. In an examination into education costs, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, folks a lot smarter than you or me, point this out, "Teachers who retire in their mid-fifties not only create vacancies that must be filled, but they also draw pension benefits for spells that are likely to exceed their years of service employment. A teacher retiring at age 55 with a $50,000 annual pension typically indexed) has received an annuity worth over $1 million."*
So let's do some Obama math... You in Washington want to save 300,000 teacher jobs with 26 billion of my dollars, how noteworthy. Then let us figure in the retirement costs using the above "conservative" number... Let's see, 1,000,000 dollars/retired teacher times 300,000 teachers is... hmmm, what was I taught, oh yeah, multiply the integers and add all the zeros on the end. WOW! 300,000,000,000 dollars in unfunded pensions. Senator, who, pray tell, is going to pay that??? Tell you what, you fix the public sector retirement fiasco bringing the economy to a screeching halt, no, not to a halt, but to a Greco, not the artist, type collapse and I might even be willing to support another bailout to a class of people who are undermining our way of life with their progressive rhetoric. Nah, that'll never happen. You think government spending is the answer to everything and I will never agree to the progressive socialist agenda.
Finally, when will you in Washington get the message! Money, especially money that is not yours, or even in existence yet, is not going to fix this problem. When you in Congress regulate our lives into "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" you are forcing mediocrity upon us all. I am not going to work harder to ensure everyone has a government teat to hang on. If you doubt this is occurring please reread your leader's very frank statement to Joe the Plumber, "It's not that I want to punish your success (insert "but I'm gonna)," Obama told him. "I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you (replace with "I") spread the (replace with "your") wealth around, it's good for everybody."
With the respect due the Office,
Edward Rodda
*http://www.caldercenter.org/PDF/1001071_Teacher_Pensions.pdf, taken 05/15/2010
