RE: Should individual "sponsorship" be allowed of community property?-Sliding Fees
From: ann (annslac.com)
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 11:11:07 -0600 (MDT)


Why should I pay twice as much as Mr. Jones next door, because I work very
hard, scratched and scraped through school to get a better job, worked 2
jobs to pay off my student loans and make sure my kids go to good schools,
then pay more than Mr. Jones because he's not willing to make the same
sacrifices?  I certainly don't feel that he should, but I also don't feel he
should benefit from my HARD work and sacrifice.

I don't think this situation is necessarily so black and white. As a counter-example, I have friends who are relatively new teachers in local schools...and we live in the SF Bay Area, where the living can be expensive. Teaching requires a master's degree and plenty of student loans. It requires long and unusual hours, since preparation time and paper-grading time and school social event time is not built into the school day. I would never suggest that these people do not work hard--and, no, they don't really get summers off at this point; they need to work in summer, too. Overall, they probably work harder than some people who make a good deal more money than they do, and yet they are having trouble getting by and some of them are leaving the profession altogether. Salaries do not always correlate fairly with effort or with the value of work--and this is true not just of teaching but of many other professions. So...while I cannot agree with subsidizing someone else's lack of effort, I could see how a larger cohousing community (maybe one big enough to include a charter school or a roving French teacher or some such thing) might choose to reassess the value of certain members' efforts by providing a sliding scale or other subsidy. It would be up to the community to decide, right?


_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L

Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.