Jon Stewart: Teachers Reap Unparalled Benefits, Like Shiny Apples

The Daily Show
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Do teacher’s really need windshields on their cars? Don’t they already have enough?

That was the question posed by Jon Stewart on Monday night, calling teachers out for their enormous benefit packages that, he said, are bankrupting states across the nation. While Stewart was hardly serious, that sentiment is being pushed in several states — most notably Wisconsin — were Governors are fighting to roll back public employees’ benefits and rights to pare state spending.

“Rather than bring the highest marginal tax rate back to where it was in the 1990s, we need to bring teacher’s abilities to negotiate their own livelihood back to the 1890s,” Stewart said.

Those sweet benefits: a cafeteria and a gym in the workplace; books with the answers in the back of them; and the daily apples brought in by students.

“You think all those apples grow on trees?” Stewart asked. “Well I don’t, because I don’t have all the answers in a book.”

If America’s teachers won’t agree to benefit cuts, Stewart had a modest proposal to fix states’ budget woes: dismantle our children and ship them to China, where they can be reassembled and taught for a fraction of the cost of teaching them here at home.