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Health Insurance Burden

Who generally bears the economic burden of paying for employer-provided health insurance?

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As documented in the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics, “businesses consistently claim that they bear the burden of the insurance they provide for employees, despite theory and empirical evidence indicating that workers bear the full incidence.” This is borne out by the fact that workers’ average hourly compensation — including both benefits and cash — has grown in accord with their average productivity for more than 70 years. Employers generally can’t compensate workers much more than their productivity warrants, or the employers will lose money and go out of business. Likewise, they can’t compensate workers much less than their productivity warrants, or the employers will lose their workers to other businesses that pay better.

DocumentationAcademic Journal Compensation & Productivity

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Chicago Public School Funding

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) claims that his city’s public schools are “grossly underfunded.”

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IN FACT, Chicago’s public schools spend an average of $662,000 per year on each classroom of students, and only a quarter of these students are proficient in reading or math. Here are the specifics:

While lobbying voters to support a statewide ballot initiative that would levy an additional 3% tax on all income above $1 million per year for more education spending and property tax relief, Johnson alleges that “we know how grossly underfunded our public schools are,” but “millionaires and billionaires” “don’t want to have to pay their fair share in taxes.”
The official budget of the Chicago public school system for its 2026 fiscal year is $10.25 billion with a total enrollment of 325,305 students, an average of $31,509 per student.
The average class size in Chicago public schools is about 21 students, amounting to $661,689 of spending per year on each classroom of students.
For comparison, the national average spending per public school student in the 2022–23 school year was $20,039, and the average spending per classroom was $404,788.
A scientific survey commissioned in 2021 by the journal Education Next and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that public school spending per student was 87% higher than what the average U.S. adult believed.
A scientific survey commissioned in 2019 by Just Facts found that public school funding per classroom was more than twice as high as the majority of voters believed.
In 2024, only 21% of Chicago’s 8th graders were proficient in math, as measured by the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.
For comparison, 39% of the nation’s 8th graders were proficient in math that year.
In 2024, only 27% of Chicago’s 8th graders were proficient in reading, as measured by the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.
For comparison, 30% of the nation’s 8th graders were proficient in reading that year.
Among college-bound high school students who take the ACT exam, only 20% meet its college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math, and science).
From the time that the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, the average inflation-adjusted spending per U.S. public school student has risen by 2.6 times, while the national average math and reading scores for 17-year olds have been flat and may have fallen because assessments on 17-year-olds haven’t been conducted since 2012, and younger students experienced substantial declines in math and reading over recent years, particularly in the wake of school closures and other ill-informed reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite inflation-adjusted spending per public school student rising by more than 4 times since 1960, only 37% of U.S. residents aged 16 and older can correctly answer a question that requires basic logic, addition, and division, even when using a calculator and taking as much time as needed.
The father of the U.S. public education system, Horace Mann, declared in 1841 that public schools are the “greatest discovery ever made by man,” and if they were “worked with the efficiency” of which they are capable, “nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.”
Two-thirds to three-quarters of all young adults in the U.S. are unqualified for military service because of poor physical fitness, weak educational skills, illegal drug use, medical conditions, or criminal records.
Public schools cannot be logically blamed for the entirety of those outcomes, but they are among the central competencies that schools purport to instill, and K–12 students spend more time in school each year than any other single waking activity over these formative years of their lives.

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