Mortgage discounts for the new aristocracy?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JUNE 1, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Mortgage discounts for the new aristocracy?
"In the past, it's been a buyer's market, but we began to feel the pinch last year," explains George Ann Rice, assistant superintendent for human resources at the Clark County School District.
Las Vegas public schools hire 70 percent of their 1,800 new teachers from out of state each year, and suddenly -- instead of pleading for a job, any job -- applicants have begun to ask about signing bonuses, moving allowances, and help in paying off student loans, Ms. Rice explains.
That's because other states have begun to pay moving costs. Some offer signing bonuses of $5,000 or more. Los Angeles now offers starting teachers $37,000 a year (compared to Clark County's $26,800), and California's governor has even started to talk about a state income tax exemption for teachers.
Clark County offers no such incentives (though, in fairness, low-cost Nevada doesn't have a state income tax, either.)
All these reasons were cited as the state Housing Division briefed Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn and other members of the state Board of Finance last week on the idea of selling $20 million to $30 million worth of taxable bonds in order to offer home loans to teachers at lower-than-market rates.
Under one version of the plan, the state Housing Division would offer mortgage loans to teachers at 2 percentage points below the market rate for the first few years of the loan, after which the rate would climb to about half a percentage point below the market -- an incentive which could be worth tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the mortgage, depending on purchase price.
"Since the state does not have the taxpayer funds to offer incentives to teachers, we have to look at other alternatives," explained Lon DeWeese, chief financial officer for the Housing Division.
But in fact, while they may appear cheaper at first glance, such schemes have their dangers.
Few object to Uncle Sam offering free or low-cost food, housing, and medical care to armed forces personnel. But how far can we take this before the populace begins to begrudge the new, preferred status of even run-of-the-mill government employees?
Given that no one has ever heard of a college student dropping out of the School of Ed to choose the easier path of aeronautical engineering, are government school teachers really "underpaid?"
The Nevada state Department of Education reports that for the 1998-99 school year, the average teacher's pay in Nevada was $40,542 before benefits. But because teachers work only 184 days a year in Clark County (for example), as compared to the national average 235-day work year for non-teachers, the relevant U.S. Department of Labor formula translates that to $29.54 per hour, or an annual rate before benefits of $61,443.
(Teachers get a three-month summer break during which they're free to take advanced classes in order to climb the salary scale. Or, they can earn extra cash by teaching summer school, tutoring, or taking a non-education job -- opportunities grabbed up by 17 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent of teachers, respectively, according to the Nevada Policy Research Institute.)
But then, "For every dollar spent on teacher salaries in Nevada, another 27.3 cents is spent on teacher benefits," reports NPRI President Judy Cresanta in her cover story in the latest edition of the Reno think tank's "Nevada Journal" magazine, "Brother, Can You Paradigm?"
"When NPRI senior research fellow Mary Novello surveyed all 17 Nevada counties and the state, she found that teacher benefits average $11,165 for each school year -- bringing total average teacher compensation per school year to $51,707," Ms. Cresanta reports. Annualized, "That total annual salary-benefit package ends up exceeding $78,364!"
Pity the starving schoolmarms. And once the otherwise useless state "Housing Division" is given a permanent new sinecure administering this "Teachers Low-Interest Home Loan Program," shall we next erect commissaries where our new aristocracy can buy better food than the common folk, at lower prices?
Before we go down this road, we might first ask whether there really is a teacher shortage -- not just an artificial shortfall caused by an insistence on arbitrary "pedagogy credentials" -- and whether any such shortage might not be caused in large part by the number of trained teachers who leave the field each year, due to the current absurd reluctance to flunk those who do not master their required skills, as well the effective ban on expelling morons and troublemakers -- turning this once rewarding profession into the equivalent of lion-taming without the whip and chair.
Another approach would be to end the government monopoly over schooling, forgiving parents their school taxes and urging them to use the money to develop competing, private schools.
If, in the meantime, the government youth camps do need to offer more incentives to recruit enough wardens, surely the best way to do that would be to free up more actual cash by thinning the ranks of mid-level administrators (who will soon outnumber teachers, if present trends continue) -- not to expand other state bureaucracies in order to provide ever more numerous incentives under the table, where the true cost grows increasingly harder for the taxpayers to measure.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
