Downvote for advertising ICE?
Says the person who actually thinks a signing bonus is what you get on starting a job. Then using camalcase to see like an idiot.
Not that I disagree with the point generally, but there is a difference of scale here.
There are around 22k ICE agents. At 150k, that’s 3.3b for the first year, and then 2.2b in following years.
There are around 4m teachers in the US. To raise them all from 55k to the 100k that ICE agents make (ignoring the hiring bonus) would cost 180b/yr. Two orders of magnitude greater.
I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m also not saying that ICE agents are good. I’m also not saying this disparity is justified.
I’m simply saying that the analogy, as given, implies that if we had the money to pay ICE agents 100k+bonuses, then we should have just paid the teachers that much instead. But that’s not how the math works. And just because the argument feels good emotionally doesn’t mean it’s accurate. And the truth shouldn’t need a lie to drive it forward. There are plenty of good, factual arguments to make, and this isn’t one of them.
There are around 22k ICE agents.
They increased payroll by 120% in the last year alone. This does not include private contracts for construction and maintenance of new detainment facilities, coming out of the $45B earmarked by Congress last year.
There are around 4m teachers in the US. To raise them all from 55k to the 100k that ICE agents make (ignoring the hiring bonus) would cost 180b/yr.
$45B -> $180B is not two orders of magnitude.
if we had the money to pay ICE agents 100k+bonuses, then we should have just paid the teachers that much instead
Pete Hegseth is currently asking Congress for an extra $200B in Pentagon spending, after increasing their budget $71B this year already.
We clearly don’t have a problem with finding more money.
We should use symmetric data where we can. We also have lots earmarked and moved around for education, it’s just a much bigger project. The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE vs educators was apples to apples, and what was literally suggested in OP. Make another post with the honest comparison if you want that to be the standard. Feeds can be both informative and honest if we make them that way.
(Also, only a few thousand jobs are offered the signing bonus. It’s a last mile carrot to get people talking, which we seem to be gullible enough to upvote and spread. I’m not enjoying being an ICE recruiter.)
The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE
It’s far more than just signing bonuses in the equation
To be fair, there are plenty other jobs thst could be cut, like CEO of Amazon
Every corporate CEO should be cut… with a guillotine
Note that the CEO’s also don’t go very far for teacher pay. It looks like a few hundred CEO’s cut would raise teachers pay by ~$100/month. Same mistake: 4 million is a big number to divide by.
How about all the money made by health insurance companies that shouldn’t exist? That’d go a long way toward funding education.
If we believe the internet, all of that is funneled to the CEOs, and so the previous post applies?
(Which seems absurd to me, but maybe the bills are rare enough that this makes sense? Does anybody have data on how big that figure is vs actual cost of the buildings+labor+materials? We could compare to other countries, but then I think we’re seeing a difference in infrastructure, social and physical, more than malfeasance.)
While I’m sure there’s a not-insignificant amount of government grants that go towards CEO pay… they’re not paid directly by the government. That’s an even worse comparison.
A failure to tax them is one remove away from direct payment.
Also, unless I’m mistaken, teachers aren’t paid from the federal budget. I believe that the vast majority of public school funding, including teacher salaries, come from local taxes. In fact, I believe school funding is paid mostly from local property taxes. There isn’t one, national public school system that’s centrally funded. It’s decentralized and can vary significantly from one district to another.
Why let facts get in the way though
This is true, but the scale goes both ways. For every dollar of public education you get $1+X out. This has been true for the vast majority of public education programs for at least the past half century. So public education is literally a good investment. I’ve never gone looking for data on ICE, but I’d bet good money that for every dollar and there’s a net loss.
In order for that argument to be valid, the country would have to be run as if it could see beyond the next financial quarter.
It is currently being run as if they are selling off parts of a stolen vehicle for scrap money, and maxing out all the cards they found inside.
Yeah, this is like the ‘1 billion is enough for to give everyone a million’ - an unfortunate bit of innumeracy. Directions good, but this is still misleading at best.
This is pretty much the same answer I give when people overrract about CEO pay. Sure they are overpaid dicks but their paycheck will often not amount to much when divided among all the employees.
The other can disappear tomorrow and nothing would change
Not true. If you get rid of jobs that are actively making the world worse, things will almost certainly get better, at least in the short term.
I mean, I need a job, and I’d love to be a mole while I’m at it.
the other can disappear tomorrow and nothing would change
Not true. People would be living in less fear, and the world would be a far better place.
I’ve heard ICE described as a militia of the unemployed mobilized to declare war on the working class
Your comment made me think of the Zimbardo prison experiment, and how there seem to be some similarities between that experiment and what is happening in US with all this ICE mess.
What have y’all been reading lately?
I just finished The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I thought was an incredible read. I would recommend anarchists and communists (and really everyone) read it for a pre-historic and historic view of social organization and freedom. What I thought was one of the more interesting concepts they developed was that in pre-contact North America, individuals had three essential freedoms that we have either lost or had greatly diminished: the right of movement, the right to refuse orders, and the right to create new social realities. (I’m slightly paraphrasing their exact language here, already returned the book to the library) They also go pretty deeply into the impact Indigenous North American societies had on European Enlightenment thought. If any of that interests you, I highly recommend it.
I also just finished The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which is much shorter but a very lovely examination of gift economies and viewing nature as a gift economy. Solarpunk people, this is probably up your alley.
Hell yeah I also recently finished the Dawn of Everything and it really blew my mind. Highly seconding it.
Graeber is fantastic. Loved “Debt: the First 5000 years”
I was really bummed to find out he died of complications related to COVID in 2020!
Unless the author of the post is tempted to quit her job as a teacher in order to become an ICE agent, her experience is actually evidence that teachers are being paid enough.
I don’t know if you’ve been asleep for the past 20 years, but in a lot of places, public school teachers are quitting. And they’re being replaced with unqualified people who are pretty much babysitters instead of instructors.
I think the point here was misunderstood.
The point is, capitalism makes workplaces pay their workers just enough so they don’t leave. This is basic supply and demand, as always. No one cares for the people or the future for that matter.
Hiring people for a people-torturing machine is harder, because some people still have moral compass, and also care for their own safety. ICE jobs, while not requiring such an extensive education, are morally wrong, brutal, and dangerous, which all reduce worker supply and raise the pay.
Besides, keeping schools understaffed does not immediately affect the economy in a big way, so they may keep it as the next generation’s problem. Keeping ICE understaffed is, in the eyes of the government, an immediate threat. You don’t want to keep an organized group of guys with guns unhappy, and you need to project the dedication in your (inhumane) ways to gain legitimacy to keep being elected (until you completely dismantle democracy).
And when the government needs something - it will get it, screwing everyone else.
Dude, you’re on lemmy. Libertarians get shot here.
In fairness, most people / places don’t like libertarians.
Not even libertarians like libertarians
eh, more like spat on from on high
Some peoples priorities encompass more than money.
That doesn’t mean money wouldn’t make their life better or their job easier. You could also hire more teachers at the same salary. Student/teacher ratios are also part of the problem.
You’re talking about someone with a masters that is responsible for the upbringing of the next generation V’s a thug.
What an absolutely shit, capitalist boot licking take.
Maybe she just wants the same pay as someone who arrests brown people.
This, and also teachers disproportionately consider their job too important to do to quit completely when mistreated, which the dystopian profit machine takes advantage of to mistreat the shit out of some of the most important and laudable people in the world.
I have a friend in Kentucky. Lovely lady. We’ve known each other about twenty years now. Long time ago she was a waitress earning decent money but wanted to be a teacher. It was going to be a financial hit (the fuck?) but I encouraged her to follow her dream.
Long story short she lasted two years before being crushed by the machine and quitting.
Yeah, I was a year or so into a job that paid close to 2x when I got my degree and couldn’t justify it. It wasn’t a great or high paying job either.
I really looked into it though and there are a lot of systemic problems with public schools. I didn’t think I’d have the stomach for it. Plus you need another six figure degree to pay for with less money.
Now to clarify, where I live this is because of race. The government has absolutely failed the African American population. The drug war and public schools were all that was really required.
When they integrated the schools, they just abandoned the South and let local and state government handle it. This is the Jim Crow government that requires the national guard to integrate schools.
Now you’ve got a separate but far superior education. That’s kinda been in place for a couple of generations.
We truly don’t have what they’re offering ICE agents after looking at the way the federal deficit has grown under Trump.
Just remember that those ICE agents are a bunch of obese, untrained, unprofessional federal agents that continually break laws.
The wealthy aristocracy that controls both parties needs a paramilitary police force in the streets to quell the inevitable uprisings that will occur once enough Americans realize that the aristocracy has dispensed with economic populism and constitutional order
In developed countries teachers unionize. They have fair wages, ample benefits, lots of vacation. Their job is still very hard but they somehow feel more valued.
Are you not aware of the teachers union in the US?
No I wasn’t, I’m not from the USA.
You are correct, it’s not even just one there are several apparently. AFT, UFT, NEA… Honestly I’m confused.
I’m glad the USA does have unions. But there seems to be some roadblocks when I read that some teachers are getting underpaid.
Teachers unionize, but they can’t strike in all states. In states like Texas, it’s illegal. No collective bargaining power.
https://www.tcta.org/legal-updates/what-happens-if-texas-teachers-strike
How is that not a violation of the first amendment?
Read the books
Kinda hard when the education system fails to teach you how to read.
I seem to recall hearing they weren’t even getting those bonuses, so had a little poke around on the internet.
It seems that the $50k sign on bonus only goes to retuning agents that were retired, and paid in $10k chucks, most of which went to taxes.
Despite the government’s attempts to keep the exact details of the offer secret (for instance, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, another DHS agency, placed an asterisk on the $50,000 bonus without seemingly clarifying what its terms are), reports suggest that only retired employees returning to the job are eligible for the bonus and that it comes in $10,000 chunks.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/unpacking-rumor-ice-agents-arent-152800052.html?guccounter=1
Should’ve called it a gratuity instead of a signing bonus. Then it wouldn’t have any taxes.
Yeah, that’s not how the Trump admin does things.
Yeah. The whole statement isn’t as accurate as they make it sound. Those bonuses aren’t going out to hardly anyone. And only a few would even qualify for that salary.
Even the basic salary is reported as not being paid as expected.
I agree with the overall idea behind this post. More money for teachers less money for the gestapo.
But let’s not misuse stats to try and make a point.
