Employees
Your "educated, dedicated, underpaid employees" have seen their salaries go up by about 20 percent after half a century of union activity while the tax money flowing into the education system as a whole has tripled.
From the perspective of a teacher, I'm not seeing a lot of value delivered there, myself. So what exactly are the unions there for, and how did our education system build the greatest country on the planet without them?
The costs in the statistics are adjusted for inflation, which negates your "cost of goods and services" theory. Sorry.