Millions of families with children in public schools face an immediate crisis. As a Campaign for America's Future/National Education Association report found, austerity budgets passed by state and local governments are forcing massive education budget cuts that affect everything from early childhood education to specialized academic programs, and are leading to ballooning class sizes that undermine efforts to raise student performance.

At the same time, communities around the country—from Sacramento, Calif., to Trenton, N.J.—are bracing for the loss of police officers and firefighters they can no longer afford to keep on the job as their local economies fail to recover from the recession. Some local elected officials have openly expressed concerns that these layoffs are already compromising the safety of the communities they serve.

In the face of this, conservatives in Congress propose no direct action to address these issues. Instead, their proposed "solution" is to relieve private corporations from obligations to act in the public interest and wealthy people from any obligation to pay their fair share of taxes. There is no evidence based on the last decade's history of business deregulation and top-end tax cuts that those alone will boost state and local finances in ways that don't have significant offsetting consequences. And in any event, the children who are now in overcrowded schools or walking unsafe streets don't have time to wait to see if policies that have failed in the past will somehow miraculously work differently in the future.

From January to September of this year, the economy created 1.2 million jobs in the private sector. At the same time, 393,000 local government and 47,000 state government jobs were wiped off the books. More than a quarter of those lost local government jobs are education-related. Sen. Robert Menendez, R-N.J., the sponsor of S. 1723, says that overall nearly 300,000 education jobs have been lost since 2008, and state and local budget crises will put as many as 280,000 teacher jobs at risk in the coming school year.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also accuses the White House and Senate Democrats of deliberately crafting the bill so that Republicans can't support it, by linking it to a tax surcharge on millionaires and billionaires. Actually, this makes perfect sense. The point of a bill such as this one would be to add liquidity and demand to the economy. More net public sector employment means more economic activity to support the private sector growth that everyone claims to want. Legislation that would protect teacher jobs that is "paid for" by budget cuts or layoffs elsewhere misses the point. And keeping teachers on the job is essential if we are going to have a well-educated, globally competitive workforce in the future.

The bill to protect teacher and first-responder jobs offers what should be an easy choice between addressing the suffering of overcrowded classrooms and riskier streets, and keeping the richest 1 percent of the country from feeling so much as a pin-prick in their income (0.5 percent of their earnings above $1 million). Except this is apparently not such as easy choice for conservatives who have so uncompromisingly compromised themselves to the bidding of the Wall Street class.