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Charlie Gibson in the Dem debate:
If you take a family of two professors here at St. Anselm, they're going to be in the $200,000 category that you're talking about lifting the taxes on.As Media Matters notes, the average salary of a tenured full professor at St. Anselm is $77,000. The average for an assistant professor is $49,000. The situation at the University of Kentucky (my home institution) is better; $96,000 for a tenured full professor, $63,000 for an assistant, although the budget meltdown that Kentucky is currently experiencing may rein that in a bit. Long story short, faculty couples who make over $200,000 total are quite rare anywhere. I suspect that Gibson's error has two origins; first, the mistaken belief that someone 15 years into a career (not counting the six-year apprenticeship period) should make a lot of money, and second the idea (bizarrely common on the right) that the Democratic Party is constituted primarily by wealthy [sic] white college professors. --Robert Farley
