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One job is important to the prosperity and safety of our future. The other can disappear tomorrow and nothing would change
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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Not that I disagree with the point generally, but there is a difference of scale here.
There are around 22k ICE agents. At 150k, that's 3.3b for the first year, and then 2.2b in following years.
There are around 4m teachers in the US. To raise them all from 55k to the 100k that ICE agents make (ignoring the hiring bonus) would cost 180b/yr. Two orders of magnitude greater.
I'm not saying it's not worth it. I'm also not saying that ICE agents are good. I'm also not saying this disparity is justified.
I'm simply saying that the analogy, as given, implies that if we had the money to pay ICE agents 100k+bonuses, then we should have just paid the teachers that much instead. But that's not how the math works. And just because the argument feels good emotionally doesn't mean it's accurate. And the truth shouldn't need a lie to drive it forward. There are plenty of good, factual arguments to make, and this isn't one of them.
To be fair, there are plenty other jobs thst could be cut, like CEO of Amazon
Every corporate CEO should be cut... with a guillotine
You are a visionary @Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
Note that the CEO's also don't go very far for teacher pay. It looks like a few hundred CEO's cut would raise teachers pay by ~$100/month. Same mistake: 4 million is a big number to divide by.
How about all the money made by health insurance companies that shouldn't exist? That'd go a long way toward funding education.
If we believe the internet, all of that is funneled to the CEOs, and so the previous post applies?
(Which seems absurd to me, but maybe the bills are rare enough that this makes sense? Does anybody have data on how big that figure is vs actual cost of the buildings+labor+materials? We could compare to other countries, but then I think we're seeing a difference in infrastructure, social and physical, more than malfeasance.)
While I'm sure there's a not-insignificant amount of government grants that go towards CEO pay... they're not paid directly by the government. That's an even worse comparison.
A failure to tax them is one remove away from direct payment.
This is true, but the scale goes both ways. For every dollar of public education you get $1+X out. This has been true for the vast majority of public education programs for at least the past half century. So public education is literally a good investment. I’ve never gone looking for data on ICE, but I’d bet good money that for every dollar in there’s a net loss.
In order for that argument to be valid, the country would have to be run as if it could see beyond the next financial quarter.
It is currently being run as if they are selling off parts of a stolen vehicle for scrap money, and maxing out all the cards they found inside.
They increased payroll by 120% in the last year alone. This does not include private contracts for construction and maintenance of new detainment facilities, coming out of the $45B earmarked by Congress last year.
$45B -> $180B is not two orders of magnitude.
Pete Hegseth is currently asking Congress for an extra $200B in Pentagon spending, after increasing their budget $71B this year already.
We clearly don't have a problem with finding more money.
We should use symmetric data where we can. We also have lots earmarked and moved around for education, it's just a much bigger project. The cost comparison for signing bonus of ICE vs educators was apples to apples, and what was literally suggested in OP. Make another post with the honest comparison if you want that to be the standard. Feeds can be both informative and honest if we make them that way.
(Also, only a few thousand jobs are offered the signing bonus. It's a last mile carrot to get people talking, which we seem to be gullible enough to upvote and spread. I'm not enjoying being an ICE recruiter.)
It's far more than just signing bonuses in the equation
Also, unless I'm mistaken, teachers aren't paid from the federal budget. I believe that the vast majority of public school funding, including teacher salaries, come from local taxes. In fact, I believe school funding is paid mostly from local property taxes. There isn't one, national public school system that's centrally funded. It's decentralized and can vary significantly from one district to another.
Why let facts get in the way though
Thank you for the lucid feedback. Putting the numbers into proper framing is a good thing. Fuck ICE, the gestapo of this terrible president.
Yeah, this is like the '1 billion is enough for to give everyone a million' - an unfortunate bit of innumeracy. Directions good, but this is still misleading at best.
This is pretty much the same answer I give when people overrract about CEO pay. Sure they are overpaid dicks but their paycheck will often not amount to much when divided among all the employees.