Today's Worst Pundit in NJ!

The award goes to... Bob Ingle!

Did you get a raise this year? Or take a cut? Or go on furlough? If you’re on Social Security you didn’t get a bump up this year. That’s a lot of that going around. But the Record took a look at newly settled teacher contracts and found that the average salary hike in New Jersey was 3.35 percent for next year. That would mark the first time in a decade where the teachers didn’t get at least 4 percent salary hikes. This year’s average was 4.35 percent. The local school boards that negotiate these contracts seem out of touch with the rest of the world and unaware of the economic crisis the country is in. That’s easier to do when you’re spending other people’s money. Gov. Christie’s spending cap seems more and more the only way to end this.

First of all, Bob, get someone in the IT Department at the APP to take all of 30 seconds to show you how to link to a story you reference on your blog. I think you can handle it.

If you had done that, your readers could see that you are full of it, because you excluded districts who took wage freezes:

The 3.35 percent average raise among the new contracts excludes a dozen districts where teachers took one-year wage freezes; including those would bring the average raise down to 2.14 percent. 

Oh, something else is in the article that might be important, Bob:

For the first time, as law now requires for settlements, the teachers will also chip in 1.5 percent of their pay for health benefits.

Might be worth mentioning. The fact is there is no comparison at all of teachers' salary increases to that of the general population this year because we don't yet have reliable data. But if Bob had bothered to look at an earlier article in the Record, he would have found:

Meanwhile, a look at data from several decades shows that while average teacher pay is higher than the average of all workers salaries -- everyone from landscapers to surgeons, for example -- it grew at a slower rate than all workers' pay grew.

Bob Ingle - today's Worst Pundit in New Jersey!