Tax plan doesn’t even pretend to help poor kids

AFTER THE HOUSE rejected last year’s plan to subsidize private school tuition, supporters came back this year with a bill they claimed addressed a central objection: that they were pushing a giveaway to wealthy parents that would do nothing to help poor children.

But this year’s plan — to give private school vouchers to poor students and tax credits to wealthy families who leave “failing” public schools — didn’t go anywhere either. So this week, supporters will try to sell a bill that doesn’t even pretend to care about helping poor kids. That means it doesn’t even pretend to address our state’s central economic problem: the failure to educate children in poor, rural school districts.

In theory, Rep. Tracy Edge’s tax credit would be available to everyone — not just poor kids or kids in failing schools. But it’s really only available to people with enough money to pay private school tuition and wait for a credit on their income tax return and who pay enough income taxes to claim the credit. That last provision effectively cuts off half the population.

This plan doesn’t even provide for the “scholarship-granting organizations” that supporters imagined would spring up to pay poor children’s private school tuition. Instead, it simply offers a $1,000 tax cut to parents who send a child to a private school and a $500 break to parents who home-school their kids.

And it adds a $100 tax credit for anyone who donates money to a public school. That’s similar in principle (although more complicated) to checking a box on your federal income tax form to divert $3 to the presidential campaign fund. In theory, this could result in millions of dollars pouring into Allendale Elementary or some other struggling school; it’s more likely to result in a slight uptick in donations to schools attended by the children of people who make enough money to think about tax credits. But the main problem is that it lets individual taxpayers decide how tax dollars are spent, which runs counter to the whole idea that we collect taxes to fund the common good, as determined by our elected representatives. If individuals decided how their tax dollars were spent, most government functions, from waging war to running public libraries, would go unfunded.

As bad as it is, Mr. Edge’s amendment has one clear virtue: It does not contain any of the bells and whistles that in previous versions have confused some well-meaning people. This is, pure and simple, an attempt to use tax money — most of which is paid by people who do not have children in school — to subsidize well-off parents who have decided not to take advantage of the schools that the taxpayers have provided.

It will not result in one poor child being “rescued” from a failing public school — or from any school, for that matter, since it offers no benefit whatsoever to the third of our population that pays no state income taxes. Nor does it offer appreciable benefit to the half of our population that pays less than $250. All this offers is a tiny bit of incentive for upper-middle class parents who are already thinking about pulling their kids out of the public schools. That, and a tax cut to every well-off parent who already has made an individual choice to enroll a child in a private school, or to teach that child at home.

This plan puts a lie to the claim that supporters want to give poor kids the same opportunities that rich kids already have, and makes last year’s boondoggle look almost respectable by comparison. It should not take the House long to dispose of it.