Use quarantine time productively, helping nurses and docs
Rather than wasting days in quarantine twatting about nonsense, make time productive to medical professionals by spending an hour a day on factual research about the economic hardships burdening nurses and doctors relative to public workers who are guaranteed COLA defined-benefit pensions and taxpayer funded health insurance.
If America insists on paying government workers like teachers a defined-benefits pension guaranteed for life with 3% annual inflationary increases, America should find money to give the same deal to nurses and doctors.
No unions necessary, just look at any teachers' contract for template of the deal.
Look up CPS teachers contract. Write down what a 1st, 3rd, and 5th year teacher vs. private sector nurse earns.
Calculate the per-hour salary (that is, nurses working 50 40-hour weeks annually compared with teachers working 170 6-hour days annually, and don't forget to subtract contractually mandated days off).
Another quantifiable benefit: health insurance:
Nurses must pay higher percentages for less coverage and lose coverage when job is lost. Teachers pay a trivial amount toward their health insurance (for better coverage than nurses) and when they early-retire at age 55-58 they pay nothing--that is, free free free.
The big daddy of them all is 'retirement' pension:
Nurses must have 6.2% deducted from their salary for social security.
Teachers have 0 deducted for social security.
If all a nurse saves for retirement is this, she will make roughly 1/3 of what teachers who must only work 10 years to vest lifetime pension benefits .
Having contributed 6.2%, nurses must wait until at least age 62 to start drawing payments from soc.sec..
Teachers start drawing on their pensions at vesting, which can be typically age 55-58.
Nurses can of course pay additional amounts into retirement savings through at-risk 401k plans and the like.
Question:
How much would a nurse have to save each year of a 10 year career to equal retirement benefits of a teacher with pension-spiked entitlement (for which teacher had to pay, at most, 2% of salary for 10 years)?
You can use an online annuity calculator to determine the answer. But calculations become complicated when one must factor in the 3% annual pension payment raise.
(If you haven't heard of what pension-spiking is, educate yourself on this method used by school districts to elevate the final years' salaries of teachers on which pension payments are based. Over and above the 6% annual raises (obligatory by contract), there are little tricks used to raise "creditable earnings", such as stipend assignments. )
In the Great Recession of 2008 our local government used the crisis to initiate massive borrowing and spending for insiders--hiring unneeded public employees and issuing un-affordable public debt for building schools which would predictably remain empty.
Now here we are again, in this coronavirus crisis, our local governments are busy seizing extraordinary powers and suspending OMA and other transparency devices set up for taxpayer protections.
There is one thing every citizen can do in case we do come out the other side of this crisis: KNOW how these predatory taxing body machinations work, watchdog the deals and spending going on now: who is getting public money and what are the relationships involved?
And if you feel any true gratitude toward nurses and doctors who are risking their own families' lives in public service, QUANTIFY your gratitude by becoming knowledgeable about the disparity in economic compensation between public workers and (mostly) private sector nurses and docs.
If society cannot afford similar defined-benefits compensation packages for nurses and doctors, society should re-think demanding nurses and docs bear the additional burden of funding them for others.