Bernie Sanders believes that teachers deserve to earn a minimum of $60,000 and that the wealthy should pay for this with higher taxes.
The teaching profession is encountering an alarming lack of personnel due to insufficient wages. Sanders solution to this is to raise salaries and finance it with modifications to the estate tax.
Maggie Perkins, a former teacher, opted for the "quiet quitting" method to find a job that was more sustainable. Eventually, she decided to leave her old job and is now happily employed at Costco, as she stated in an interview with Fox Business. "My pace of my work life now is so much better, I am not sick or exhausted like I used to be when I was a teacher," she says.
The U.S. is dealing with a teacher shortage that is both unparalleled and ongoing. Perkins is not an outlier, as many instructors depart the field due to exhaustion and low salaries.
Sen. Sanders has proposed a solution to the teacher salary issue: setting the minimum salary at $60,000 and covering the cost through taxation of those who receive inheritances of more than $3.5 million.
At a Monday town hall concerning teacher pay, Sanders declared "In America today, 44% of public school teachers quit the profession within 5 years." "Why is that? Why are so many public school teachers leaving the profession they love? Well, there are many reasons. But one of the primary reasons is the pathetically low pay teachers receive. In America today, the starting pay for teachers in almost 40% of our school districts is less than $40,000 a year."
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers in public elementary and secondary schools make an average wage of $65,090 -- a decrease of over $2,000 from the 2010 adjusted inflation rate.
The lowest salary is recorded in Mississippi where primary school teachers earn $47,655. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the lowest 10% of kindergarten and elementary school teachers make under $43,950 and have a median wage of $60,900 as of May 2021.
Sanders' plan to fund higher teacher salaries is grounded in the estate tax, which he intends to make more inclusive and rigorous. He has previously suggested reducing the exemption to $3.5 million and stepwise increasing the taxes on inheritances over that figure, with a maximum of 65% on estates valued at over $1 billion. The estate tax can currently reach up to around 40%, but Sanders' proposed tax would begin with a 45% marginal tax rate on estates worth more than $3.5 million.
With the current Republican House majority, Sanders plans are not realistic as the house is more focused on tax cuts. Nonetheless, Sanders believes it is vital to address the pay of educators, who are paid less than those who provide doggy daycare services.
"In my view, there is something fundamentally wrong in America when we pay more to take care of our pets than to take care of our young children, he said.
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