Why is it that you and others claim that President Obama simply cannot lower costs but keep services via decree or negotiated settlement or law while many of the same Obama critics do exactly that by mandating that public school teachers can indeed give the same service - or even more - at the same time they reduce wages or benefits for them?
It seems there is a serious contradiction in the thinking process there.
Well, that's a good question. I would suggest that you are, however, missing a couple of key points.
1. You are running for an hour? good grief - I'm so glad I don't have to do that any more. CrossFit, baby
2. Many on the right are not "pushing to lower teacher pay and benefits" as an end in itself - we are looking to make them more flexible to allow localities to
survive.
3. Within that push, you will find that generally we support the same thing in healthcare prices that we support in "teacher" prices - namely, that the price be set by competition rather than government fiat. We believe that such a model will get us the best result for the buck, and that is why we support things like school choice.
4. In fact, many conservatives wish to pay teachers
more in order to pay them competitively, specifically with regards to incentive and performance pay. It is the current
compensation packages that are problematic. Conservatives tend to suspect that you get what you pay for, and by instituting compensation packages that are tilted away from items that can be linked to job performance (and aren't anyway) such as salary and towards retirement packages, we suspect that we are attracting candidates who are being rewarded not for performance, but for longevity.
5. It's worth noting that unions actually feed this suspicion. Our end product that we seek in education is not a "good teacher", but rather a "well educated student body". By loudly and aggressively attacking any notion that teachers can be held responsible for whether or not they have had an impact on producing a "well educated student body", unions teach the rest of us that we do not
need to pay for top-teachers, as it seems that they cannot have a discernible difference on our end product.
Now, I don't believe the union claims in #5 for a second. But the more that teachers shout that they cannot be priced competitively, the more people think "okay, then we don't need to pay them competitively".