The Pay of Chicago School Teachers and Selected Others, including Rahm Emanuel [View all]

The Pay of Chicago School Teachers and Selected Others

Center for Economic and Policy Research
Wednesday, 12 September 2012 03:53

Since the Chicago school teachers went out on strike Monday, many political figures have tried to convince the public that their $70,000 average annual pay is excessive. This is peculiar, since many of the same people had been arguing that the families earning over $250,000, who would be subject to higher tax rates under President Obama's tax proposal, are actually part of the struggling middle class. They now want to convince us that a household with two Chicago public school teachers, who together earn less than 60 percent of President Obama's cutoff, have more money than they should.

Anyhow, if we want to assess whether someone is getting too much money, we always have to ask the follow-up question, compared to what? Here are a few comparisons that I have found useful.

The first comparison number is the annualized pay that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel got for a 14-month stint as a director at Freddie Mac. President Clinton appointed him as a director shortly after he left the administration. It's not clear exactly what Mr. Emanuel did as a director, he was not appointed to any board committees. While Emanuel's stint ended just as the housing bubble was building up steam, Freddie Mac was involved in an accounting scandal during this period for which it was forced to pay several million dollars in fines.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-pay-of-chicago-school-teachers-and-selected-others?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beat_the_press+%28Beat+the+Press%29

PS: I'm so old, I remember when Democrats supported unions, not management.