Teachers Teaching People How To Hire People

WHEN I ENTERED THE ROOM in cyberspace, the argument had already started. The retired teacher, a progressive and the wife of one of my high school classmates from 1973, was obviously upset. I read her comment which said: "I don't understand why teachers get to deduct only two hundred and fifty dollars in expenses for school supplies from their income tax each year, while corporate executives get to deduct from their taxes the expense of an entire corporate jet." She was using capital letters, yell typing, a sure sign of anger. Her adversary, another high school classmate of mine, one I never liked, and considered a moron forty six years ago and do to this day, made a smug, dismissive reply: "Businesses hire people. Teachers don't." I just had to jump in. I typed: "Teachers teach people how to hire people." And that was the last of the conversation. Nobody said another word. I never figured out whether my comment was so profound that it rendered all further discussion useless, which I preferred to believe, or whether the other participants suddenly got phone calls, and never came back. In American culture, there is no definitive argument, because there is no one willing to concede an argument, under any circumstances, no matter how strong the evidence presented. We are a nation in which everyone is always correct, and nobody ever stands corrected. I assume that my conservative moronic classmate had no idea what I was talking about, and assumed that I, whom he knows to be a liberal, was insanely ranting liberal lies. Perhaps had I gotten the chance to explain to him that hiring people requires literacy and social skills, both learned in school, and that one can never hope to become a business executive without the direct assistance of teachers, he would have grudgingly understood. More likely, he would have had some inane response, right wing style. Maybe he would have said that without business revenue, public education would be impossible. Hell, who knows? Of course, public education is socialism, and paid for by taxes on capitalistic private property. Was my pro corporate jet classmate trying to say that tax deductions are given for private jets in order to allow businesses to take the money thus saved and invest it in hiring more people? Really? As if that is automatically what they will do with it? How does he know? He doesn't. Similarly, when large corporations get tax reductions, like the big one given to them by Trump and the Republicans last year, supposedly, the reduction from thirty five percent to twenty one percent will enable them to hire more workers. But saving money by paying lower taxes is not why businesses hire more people. The reason why businesses hire more people, the one and only, eternally true reason, is an increase in the amount of business they do, an increase in the demand for the goods or services they provide, necessitating the hiring of more workers to produce and provide said goods or services. That's it. If a business has more customers, the business must of necessity hire more workers to produce what the customers want to buy. Hell, if you own a business, and you save money by suddenly paying lower taxes, you can do whatever you want with the money saved, anything from raising salaries for workers, raising salaries for executives, paying out dividends for shareholders, or reinvesting the money back into the business. Research has been done on this, asking the question; how do business most generally use money saved by tax reductions? The answer, it turns out, is not surprising. Tax savings, overwhelmingly, go towards increased executive salaries and bonuses for the top executives, or go to the major share holders, in the form of dividends. Workers do not get hired, money is not reinvested into the business in the form of equipment purchases, or upgrades to existing systems and buildings, upgrades to physical facilities. And, most unsurprising of all, the money which corporations save from tax reductions almost never goes to increasing worker's salaries, or to charitable donations, animal shelters, anti-poverty programs, or contributions to houses of worship. Whether business hire people has nothing to do with whether they pay for their own corporate jets, and everything to do with demand, supply, and necessity. Maybe my pro private jet friend would have learned that in school, if his teachers had been paid better, or had been able to afford more school supplies.