Jenny Luna at Mother Jones writes—Buying a Home Is Nearly Impossible for Teachers in These Cities:
Lauren Paquette dreams of owning a home with a pool. But the 34-year-old fifth-grade science teacher knows it's a pipe dream: She recently had to find a roommate to help with the monthly rent of $1,425 on her three-bedroom house in Houston. Although that's relatively cheap compared with rents across the country, it's tough on a teacher's salary. Saving up for a down payment is out of the question, said Paquette, a single mother.
"It's not like I went into this job thinking I'd make a bunch of money, but I expected to be able to make ends meet," Paquette said. Finances have been easier since she left North Carolina for Texas (North Carolina ranks in the lower tenth of states for teacher pay), but Paquette's struggles aren't unique.
As housing prices have soared in all the usual major metropolitan areas—as well as in cites like Las Vegas, Sacramento, Atlanta, and Minneapolis—teachers' wages haven't kept pace. And with school districts already struggling to recruit and retain educators, this rising gap is just another barrier to keeping teachers in the profession. [...]
Coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Trump’s right-wing political correctness makes us less safe, by Ian Reifowitz
- Law and disorder at the CBP, by Susan Grigsby
- NO to everything Trump and YES to Starbucks for doing the right thing, by Egberto Willies
- We’ll consider Gorsuch after you consider Merrick Garland, by David Akadjian
- Is Steve Bannon Donald Trump’s Rasputin? Da, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Judge not, lest ye be judged, by Jon Perr
- Killing the EPA, by Mark E Andersen
- How black women helped shape history and today’s Democratic Party, by Denise Oliver Velez
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”
—Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978.
TWEET OF THE DAY
(In case you’re curious about the origin of tonight’s TOTD, click here.)
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama Caps CEO Salaries of TARP Recipients; Who Will Work for a Paltry $500,000 Per Year?
Look, here's the situation: Bush may have wanted to bail out his backers in the financial services industry, and that may have driven his support for the $700 billion bailout. But most people who supported it did it in spite of the irresponsible CEO's who helped create the collapse of the credit markets. Most people who supported the bailout did so because it was too important to the entire economy to keep credit from completely drying up. It was a case of how people often refer to what FDR did during the Depression: it was saving capitalism from the capitalists.
But the guys (and they're almost all guys) who blew their companies' money on obscure "financial products" that were mostly just bets on bets on bets, they don't deserve any great rewards from the taxpayers. It's not in the public interest to make sure they continue to get over over 350 times the pay of the average American worker.
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