When this whole Wisconsin business...

...started about a month ago, my first thought was how people have been saying -- all my life -- that teachers are underpaid and something should be done about it.

This morning, Nicholas Kristof's column in the Times says just that:

From the debates in Wisconsin and elsewhere about public sector unions, you might get the impression that we’re going bust because teachers are overpaid.

That’s a pernicious fallacy. A basic educational challenge is not that teachers are raking it in, but that they are underpaid. If we want to compete with other countries, and chip away at poverty across America, then we need to pay teachers more so as to attract better people into the profession.
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Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

And all I want to say is, "STOP!" Stop saying that! Because if there's one thing that should be crystal clear from the events in Wisconsin this past month, it's that we've decided -- once and for all -- that teachers are overpaid.

(The first thing someone said to me at that memorial service yesterday was, "Walker finally did the right thing with those freeloaders!")

The fact of the matter is that we never intended to pay teachers better and we never will. So let's just admit that and get on with our lives.

When public sector unions negotiated the contracts that are now being defaulted on (and make no mistake about it, it's a municipal default, just like a bond default), it was because the taxpayers couldn't (or wouldn't) increase teacher pay. It was a classic case of, "I can't give you a raise, but I'll give you XYZ." (Sound familiar?) In the teachers' case, it was better health care and retirement benefits. (Or, what is commonly known as "deferred compensation.")

That's all gone now.

And one of the morals of the story is something I learned in my own career a long time ago: get paid today. As they taught us in business school, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. Why? One reason is, you may not get that dollar tomorrow. As we used to say at the Merc, "bonuses, i. e., deferred compensation, have a way of not getting paid."

So the bottom line is: Wisconsin teachers will never be paid as well as they once were. Get used to it.

And Governor Walker and the Republicans, by lowering corporate taxes and busting the unions, are trying to turn Wisconsin into another Mississippi or Alabama -- a state with a poorly-educated, low-skilled, low-wage, non-union workforce sliding into mediocrity.

Meanwhile, my rich friend from the memorial service will be retired in Florida.