By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
AUG. 8, 2023 | Often you get tidbits of news that doesn’t fit in about any place. But these short items are interesting, and sometimes vital. Let’s visit some today.
Gwinnett County’s school budget for this coming fiscal will now include a $3,500 salary increase for teachers, a minimum 4.5% cost-of-living increase for classified staff. And in a major step, the school system’s minimum wage will increase to $15/hour across the board, which includes, bus drivers, school nutrition employees and custodians. The starting salary for a new GCPS teacher with a bachelor’s degree is now $55,146.
Research from 2018 shows that the top one percent of all families in the U.S. take home 21 percent of all the income in the U.S., making 26.3 times more than the bottom 99 percent, whose average income is slightly more than $50,000 a year. This comes from the Economic Policy Institute, an independent, nonprofit think tank. You would need an annual income of slightly more than $420,000 to be a member of that top one percent! That fodder to show income disparity is big, big, big.
Quoting Tom Baxter from the August 1 Saporta Report, on the Almanac of American Politics for 2024:
“Today, Georgia is 33 percent Black, 10.2 percent Hispanic and 4.6 percent Asian. That’s the third-highest African-American percentage of any state (behind Mississippi and Louisiana) and the second-lowest percentage of whites east of the Mississippi River (after Maryland). Projections from the Atlanta Regional Commission find that the Atlanta area’s white population is set to fall from 47.5 percent in 2015 to 31 percent in 2050. More than one of every 10 Georgians is foreign-born, up from 2.7 percent in 1990.”
Were you wide awake at 5 a.m. Sunday watching the women’s soccer tournament from Down Under? We were. While we seldom watch soccer routinely, for some reason we thought history might be on tap in that match-up, and made ourselves get out of bed.
We were rewarded by the American women’s team playing its best game of the FIFA tournament in Melbourne, against Sweden. If you didn’t realize the results, the game ended in a 0-0 tie, forcing two 15 minute overtime periods. Neither team scored in the overtime, forcing penalty kicks.
That shootout itself ended tied 4-4, resulting in additional shots. Finally, Sweden won, 5-4, when the American goalie stopped the ball, but it trickled barely past the goal line to send Sweden into the round of eight, and forcing the USA team out of the tournament, its earliest exit in World Cup play. The game was so sharp that I never fell back to sleep during the game.
Tattoos. You may have one, I don’t. And won’t. Happily, I do not remember seeing a tattoo on a member of the American’s women soccer team. Why would you want to disfigure your body?
Suwanee residents will be pleased to hear that their city’s ad valorem tax rate will remain the same as it has for 11 years: 4.93 mills. However, with growth, their budget will increase to $17.9 million, an eight percent increase compared to last year’s budget. Attaway, Mayor Jimmy Burnette and Council.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Follow Us