California Teachers Make 6 Figures on Average. Now They Demand More.

Plus: Steel and aluminum tariffs, Venezuelan sanctions and deportations, and more...

California's teacher demands: You might think, given that less than a third of the state's fourth graders have been deemed proficient in reading, and just over a third proficient in math, with test scores that have failed to improve for the last 16 years, that teachers in California would wait to have better job performance before they demand more money.

You would be thinking wrong.

Student enrollment, statewide, has decreased by 360,000 since 2020. Funding has nevertheless exploded. But last week, the California Teachers Association announced the start of their "We Can't Wait" campaign, which coordinates 77,000 educators in 32 districts who teach more than a million students, to "come together around a set of shared demands" which include, predictably, better class sizes, "more resources" for students, and—you guessed it!—more money.

Local unions apparently coordinated their contract expiration dates so that tons of teachers contracts across the state expire this June. Surveyed by GBAO Strategies over the last few months, 84 percent of teachers say they "cannot afford to live near their schools" and 81 percent "say their salaries are not keeping up with rising costs for groceries, childcare and other necessary expenses." Of course, that state's issues with the high cost of living are felt by people across all sectors, and will be remedied not by paying public employees more but by getting government out of the way of building more housing, and by improving the nation's overall fiscal health to curb inflation (a situation partially created by…government stimulus checks).

The union touts research by Sylvia Allegretto at California's Center for Economic and Policy Research, which claims that "the relative pay of US public school teachers was 26.6% less than that of similar nonteacher college graduates in 2023." This is supposed to show that teachers are in some way systematically undervalued. But of course plenty of private sector employees—those in finance, tech, and law, for example—make more, on average, than teachers (and drive up the average); there are, for starters, fewer people who can be decent hedge fund managers or quant developers than can be second grade teachers. At the same time, teaching bestows many benefits that fall outside the realm of traditional compensation: extreme job security, summers off, generous government pensions, union protection.

Perhaps the most striking is that these union leaders believe they can extort taxpayers through threatened work stoppages while their results have slipped. If you want your school system to continue hemorrhaging students, that is a surefire way to go about it.

Barreling toward autarky: Today, President Donald Trump reportedly plans to announce 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from all trading partners, fulfilling promises he made on the campaign trail.

"The top five suppliers of steel to the American market in January were Canada, followed by Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Germany. Canada has also led in aluminum exports to the United States, while the United Arab Emirates, Russia and China are far behind," reports The New York Times. China is already a huge steel exporter globally, but since tariffs are already in place on such imports, Xi Jinping has long found creative ways of funneling semi-processed Chinese steel to places like Vietnam, where it is then finished and exported. When the tariffs are applied universally, those workaround supply chains may be a lot less valuable.

"Previously, the president has also pledged that the U.S. would impose tariffs on computer chips, pharmaceuticals, copper, oil and gas imports as soon as mid-February," reports The Wall Street Journal.

So far, administration officials and their allies in Congress appear to be dividing tariffs into two categories: "punitive" (like those recently threatened on Canada and Mexico, a Trumpian attempt to get those countries to invest more in border security) and "structural, long-term" ones (like the steel and aluminum tariffs). These are misnomers, though, because all of these tariffs are punitive: They will impose big costs on American consumers while adding to global instability, creating cycles of retribution and reducing existing international goodwill. That Trump has embraced tariffs as a foreign policy instrument—a means of pressuring other countries into doing his bidding, or at least making a show of doing his bidding when they were already planning on doing kind of the same thing (as in Canada's case)—is a bad thing.

People are freaking out about DOGE, but all for what? "To be clear, what the DOGE team and U.S. Treasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following," wrote Elon Musk on X over the weekend. "Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible; All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!; The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily."

Musk continues: "The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn't exist already!"

If that is in fact what is happening, all of this makes complete and total sense.

CFPB sledgehammered: Meanwhile, reports The Wall Street Journal, "Trump's newly installed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Russell Vought is closing the bureau's headquarters and has ordered staff to halt all of their supervisory efforts, ramping up the administration's attempt to revoke the financial regulator's authority." Vought informed the Federal Reserve, which funds it, that the bureau "will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding."

"Picture this: a government agency that operates with little accountability, spends taxpayers' money without congressional oversight, and enforces regulations based on flimsy theories about consumer behavior," wrote Veronique de Rugy in Reason last month. "That's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an institution so misguided in both mission and execution that it does not deserve mere reform—it should be abolished outright."

Birthed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) first in concept in 2007, then in action in 2010, when then–President Barack Obama appointed her chief, the CFPB was designed to be unaccountable, the very characteristic that has now allowed its seeming demise. Beautiful!

Warren deliberately and extraordinarily made CFPB unaccountable to democracy and elected officials. That was literally the point of the agency. https://t.co/Py29YeMGB2

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) February 8, 2025

The CFPB is NOT funded by Congress but by the Federal Reserve, an intentional gambit by Democrats that allows CFPB to evade Congressional oversight. But that's a double-edged sword: if it isn't funded by Congress, that means a President doesn't need Congress to defund it either.

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 8, 2025

(To be very clear, this is an anti-Warren newsletter. When I see Warren-roasting content, I feel it is my patriotic duty to post it. A certain amount of schadenfreude directed at The Other Liz feels so right.)

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Scenes from New York: President Donald Trump told the New York Post he plans to use the federal Department of Transportation to kill off New York City's congestion pricing. New York "should focus on safety and cleanliness in the subway," said Trump, adding that "cleanliness and efficiency are good but they gotta get tough on the thugs. They can't be nice." Honestly? Hard agree.

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QUICK HITS

• "A Florida magnate with close ties to the Republican Party helped set up the recent meeting between Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump's special envoy, laying the groundwork for a major deal that would allow the Caracas regime to boost its oil sales to the United States in exchange for accepting hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan deportees," reports the Miami Herald.
• A new book, The Age Of Choice, asks whether having options truly makes us free. The New York Times review (with predictable concluding paragraph) is here.
• "The U.S. bishops' conference laid off 50 people on Friday, roughly one-third of staff members in its migration and refugee services office, after a halt to federal reimbursements for contracted refugee and migrant resettlement programs," reports the Catholic publication The Pillar.