Put Parents in Charge details get closer look

March 2, 2005

Legislation is like an onion — there are many parts to peel away before you get to the core of a proposal.

So it is with the governor’s plan to give tax credits to people who want to send their children to private school. The plan, which Gov. Mark Sanford maintains will improve public education by creating competition, is nothing more than public money supporting private education, a stance we disagreed with when we first heard of it and one we’ll continue to oppose.

Now it seems some legislators are realizing that there is more to this proposal than was revealed when that first layer of indignation at the supposed poor state of education in South Carolina was offered up as justification for its implementation.

(For the record, we don’t think public education in our state is the disaster that has been all-too-often implied.)

When the legislation is analyzed, it seems that not only can public dollars be used to support private education with parents getting tax credits and thus lowering their obligations to the state budget, but businesses can supplement private school tuition with scholarships to lower income parents — and lower business tax bills as well.

Thus Put Parents in Charge is losing some support from legislators who fear income taxes paid previously in cold, hard cash will be substituted by warm and fuzzy scholarship programs and affect the state budget adversely.

Even those who support the tax credits for individuals are finding fault with the provision for businesses. This aspect makes little sense to us; a bad idea is a bad idea, whether it applies to the individual or to a business. If a parent chooses to send his child to a private school, that’s his choice. But his neighbor shouldn’t have to pay for it — and his neighbor will in the long run, not just in the possibility of increased taxes to make up for lost revenue but in the decline of support for public education, the bedrock of a civilized society.

In the end, public dollars to support private education is simply a bad idea.

Rep. Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, scoffs at the idea that businesses would support the scholarship program to the extent that it would adversely affect the state budget. He is one of the governor’s strongest backers for private school tuition tax credits, according to published reports.

Other legislators who support the proposal have tried to dispel concerns about the overall result to the state’s bottom line by claiming that most parents won’t pull their children out of public school in the first place.

We appreciate that our lawmakers are putting so much time and effort into discussing legislation, not rushing to judgment, neither blindly going along with the governor out of party loyalty on this issue, nor flatly dismissing some of his other proposals out of party dissension.

But why are they spending so much time on tuition tax credits in the first place if even its strongest supporters are downplaying the impact should it pass? And how will such a proposal help public education — the governor’s main claim — if it is a proposal that would have such little impact on so few people?

There are too many other concerns of South Carolina — the first being how we can help public education improve rather than how we can advance the cause of private education at taxpayers expense — we wonder if lawmakers shouldn’t move on to other issues and chalk up Put Parents in Charge as a learning experience.

Copyright 2005, Anderson Independent Mail. All Rights Reserved.