AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
- Bernie Sanders wants teachers to make a minimum of $60,000, and to pay for it with taxes on wealthy estates.
- Currently, teachers are facing low pay, and the profession is seeing an unprecedented labor shortage.
- Sanders' proposal to address that is higher pay, offset with changes to the estate tax.
Maggie Perkins, a former teacher, had to resort to "quiet quitting" to make her job more sustainable. Finally, she left, and is working at Costco — something she loves, according to her 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," Perkins said in a TikTok caption.
Perkins isn't alone, as the country faces down an unprecedented, persistent teacher shortage, with many teachers leaving the profession behind over burnout and low pay.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has a plan to address that: He wants to give teachers a minimum salary of $60,000, and offset that cost with taxes on Americans who inherit over $3.5 million.
"In America today, 44% of public school teachers quit the profession within 5 years," Sanders said in a prepared remarks at a Monday town hall on teacher pay. "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, the average salary for teachers at public elementary and secondary schools was $65,090 — over $2,000 less than than what teachers earned on average in 2010, adjusted for inflation. Average pay for teachers was as low as $47,655 in Mississippi. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bottom 10% of kindergarten and elementary school teachers earn under $43,950, and their median wage, was $60,900 as of May 2021.
Sanders' plan to pay for higher teacher salaries hinges on the estate tax, which he wants to make both broader and higher. Sanders has previously proposed lowering the exemption to the estate tax to $3.5 million (currently, nearly $13 million can be exempted), and incrementally increasing the taxes levied on inheritances over $3.5 million, with an up-to 65% tax on estates worth over $1 billion. Currently, estate taxes can reach up to about 40%; under Sanders' previously proposed tax, the lowest marginal tax rate on an estate worth more than $3.5 million would be 45%.
The likelihood of any tax hikes moving forward in the current Congress is low, as Republicans eye abolishing the income tax and even the IRS, and propose to permanently enshrine President Donald Trump's 2017 package of tax cuts.
But Sanders thinks it's necessary to deal with the state of teacher pay, noting that childcare workers fare even worse, making less than doggy daycare workers.
"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.