An advisor to Donald Trump wants to make the job of teacher tax exempt.

This would effectively give them an immediate raise of somewhere between 30-40%, make the job more important (as the only tax-exempt job), and increase the attractiveness of the role to new people.

2/3rds of Americans have a basic high school education, and nothing more. That's a big problem. Making teaching an attractively-paying job would go a long ways to bringing attention to the role and issues.

kleinbl00:

    “Most people don’t know that two-thirds of the workforce in the United States has a high school education or less,” Schwarzman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher.

And nobody called him on it.

    Two-thirds of labor force in 2016 had at least some collegeIn 2016, one-third of the labor force completed no more than high school, while the remaining two-thirds had at leastsome college experience.

That's the fuckin' Trump BLS, man. It's the top hit when you call Blackstone CEOs on their bullshit.

    But on the new podcast episode, he shared a series of policy goals — including a national $15 minimum wage and public education reforms.

The Federal Minimum Wage is Becoming Irrellevant

    “Teachers are pretty poorly paid,” he said. “You see these demonstrations on television and strikes, and so I think we need to get teachers in a position where they can attract very high-quality people. One way to do that is to make teachers the only tax-exempt occupation in the United States.

Most teacher protests are about benefits and layoffs - but we'll ignore that for a minute. The average teacher salary in the United States is $60k, with a $40k delta between highest and lowest. At a $60k tax bracket, the tax bracket is 18.5%, of which $3750 goes to social security and $6500 is a federal income tax. At 3.2 million teachers in the US, that's a tax cut of $12b to social security and a tax cut of $20b to the IRS. The Trump tax cut was $1.5T.

This is the same guy who, in 2010, said Obama's proposed tax increase was "like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."


posted 1680 days ago