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#vouchers

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Continued thread

Next up in our tour of budget analysis on Common Dreams, I'd like to share a report that demonstrates why I'm referring to this bill as a literal "class war" budget. This monstrous bullshit is basically a nesting doll of terrible policies and financial gifts for some of the worst people in our society, at the expense of the most vulnerable. In addition to ripping over a trillion dollars out of social safety net programs, the reconciliation bill *also* creates a tax shelter for rich people funding the longstanding fundie fascist quest to privatize American schools, while effectively disincentivizing actual charitable giving.

commondreams.org/news/republic

GOP Bill Gives Rich Funders of Deeply Unpopular School Privatization 'A Lucrative Tax Shelter'

"In effect, according to an analysis published Thursday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the legislation "allows wealthy individuals to avoid paying capital gains tax as a reward for funneling public funds into private schools."

"While the bill significantly cuts charitable giving incentives overall, nonprofits that commit to focusing solely on supporting private K-12 schools would be spared from those cuts and see their donors' tax incentive almost triple relative to what they receive today," ITEP explained. "On top of that, the bill goes out of its way to provide school voucher donors who contribute corporate stock with an extra layer of tax subsidy that works as a lucrative tax shelter."

"The House tax plan would create a system that treats people supporting private K-12 vouchers far more generously than donors to children's hospitals, veterans' groups, and every other cause imaginable," the group added.

ITEP estimated that if the policy had been in effect in 2021, billionaire Elon Musk could have saved $690 million in federal capital gains taxes."

As I wrote back when Trump named school voucher advocate Betsy DeVos his first Education Secretary, the privatization of American schools is a longstanding goal of ruling class fundie fascists, who stand to benefit from that privatization in a plethora of ways. Not only do these folks have billions of dollars invested in private education companies looking to monetize the replacement of America's public education system, they also want to establish those schools as Christian Nationalist indoctrination centers away from the prying eyes of state regulators, advocacy groups, and teachers unions. These folks paid a lot of money to buy GOP politicians and everything about this aligns completely with the Trump administration's fascist agenda, so I'm not at all surprised that the GOP is now trying to actively incentivize investing in school privatization; if you want to know why the Pork Reich is busy trying to sabotage public education, look no further than the millions and millions of dollars the folks behind the Christian Nationalist school voucher lobby stand to gain from it.

Common Dreams · GOP Bill Gives Rich Funders of Deeply Unpopular School Privatization 'A Lucrative Tax Shelter' | Common Dreams"The House tax plan would create a system that treats people supporting private K-12 vouchers far more generously than donors to children's hospitals, veterans' groups, and every other cause imaginable."
#Budget#GOP#Trump

Call/email your Congressfolk to tell them to vote NO on the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), H.R. 833/S. 292, a bill that would divert $10 billion per year from public education to fund private school vouchers through a 100% tax credit scheme

It allows the wealthy to fully offset their donations to scholarship-granting organizations, turning public funds into private school subsidies

It lacks accountability. It funds private institutions that can discriminate against students & ignore curriculum standards w/o having to report educational outcomes

It will exacerbate educational disparities, particularly affecting students with disabilities and those from low-income communities

Public schools, which serve 90% of American children, will lose critical resources, leading to larger class sizes, program cuts, & school closures

It opens new avenues for tax avoidance, such as evading capital gains taxes

An easy way to call is using 5calls. org

Continued thread

#JohnRoberts said programs where #SCOTUS deemed #religious #schools eligible for playground #grants & school #vouchers were also “created & controlled by the state.”

He asked if the relevant test was whether the #school was “a creation & creature of the state? Because all of those were,” he said. “And we held it under the #FirstAmendment, you couldn’t exclude people because of their religious belief.”

#law #Constitution #ChurchAndState #NewApostolicReformation #education #ActivistCourt

Replied in thread

@TCatInReality If memory serves me right, #JoeBiden could've used #ExecutiveOrder for #Abortion Rights, like: Set up Abortion Clinics on #Federal Lands inside Red States which was #ElizabethWarren proposed, do Federal #Telehealth Service for Free Abortion Pills & Fund for Abortion Clinics and Travel #Vouchers in nearby States.

Among other things in Executive Order like #Healthcare for the country under a provision in #ObamaCare.

texasobserver.org/whos-paying-

Calling all #texans #texan #texas to read this 1998 article from @TexasObserver #TexasObserver about school #vouchers. If we have any hope of stopping this monstrosity, we've gotta understand its roots. Consider this 1998 article a prophetic post-mortem of how school vouchers finally got through the Lege #txlege. Then subscribe to The Texas Observer and start organizing outside of the two-party right-wing duopoly. (#txpol)

================================

>Bullock wouldn’t discuss his recent resignation from the voucher PAC Putting Children First. But his aide, Tony Proffitt—who has worked for Bullock since long before he moved from the comptroller’s to the lieutenant governor’s office—said the Lieutenant Governor still supports a “very limited voucher program,” and that he left Putting Children First because, as was first reported by the Dallas Morning News, “it was engaging in partisan activity.” The specific partisan activity was a January 19 letter from Putting Children First Chairman Jimmy Mansour to Betsy DeVoss, the founder of the Amway company [2025 Editor’s Note: Betsy DeVos married the son of the founder of Amway]. The letter refers to last session’s “tremendous momentum for our forces, as evidenced by Lt. Governor Bob Bullock joining our effort.” And it mentions plans “to gain two additional seats in the senate, where we currently hold a slim majority.”

Lolwut? "I left the PAC because it was doing PAC things." Were PACs, in the 1990s, genuinely considered to be "non-partisan" entities engaged in "non-partisan" activities? Or is that just Bullock grasping for straws?

(Reading ahead: grasping for straws)

Also, I guess Betsy DeVoss has been entangled in Christian Right politics for a while.

>“They assured him it wouldn’t be partisan,” Proffitt said. “Bullock still believes that a child who has been refused admission to another public school, after leaving a low-performing public school, should be allowed to attend a private school—as long as it doesn’t have a religious program.”

Why do I get the feeling that reading this 1998 article is gonna have me pining for the right-wing of the 1990s? (Yes, I know Bullock was a Democrat; No, Democrats are not, and never have been, left-wing).

>And in all likelihood, he has known and knows about Putting Children First, which until last year operated as a thoroughly partisan political action committee called “The A+ PAC for Parental School Choice.”

The rhetoric is the same, even 30+ years ago.

>Although A+ focused on the House and Board of Education, it also worked to ensure that the Senate over which Bullock presided would have a Republican majority, giving at least $20,000 to the unsuccessful candidacy of Bob Reese and at least $5,000 to Senator Steve Ogden, who trounced a woefully underfunded Democratic opponent.

Those numbers are fucking quaint.

>(Besides directly electing Republican candidates in the past two sessions, the PACs’ targeting of vulnerable incumbent Democrats has driven the cost of campaigns so high that the limited funding resources of Texas Democrats are constantly exhausted.)
>
>...
>
>It is in general elections that PACs make a big splash, and in the last election A+ PAC (Mansour, Leininger, Walton, and several big, out-of-state funders) made sure that conservative Republican candidates were awash in money. So Putting Children First has been bi-partisan thus far. But the last time these funders got together as the A+ PAC, the contributions were indeed “imbalanced.” The A+. PAC provided a total of $8,500 to Democratic House candidates. To Republicans, it contributed $587,445. As with the Putting Children First money, almost all the A+ Democratic money went to minority, inner-city Democrats, who now find themselves in the seemingly awkward position of accepting contributions from corporate and Christian right funders whose explicit and much-announced goals include making the Democrats a minority party, and reducing funding for public education. In this battle, “vouchers” are simply a means to an end—and that end is defined by Republican funders.

*Dingalingaling!* (that's a bell) Democrats underfund Texas (even when they ruled it, apparently). Also, water is wet. If you think the Democrats have learned in the intervening 30 years, they haven't.

>I asked Glen Lewis, an African-American Democrat from Fort Worth, if he had any misgivings about such funding, considering that most of the $685,000 Leininger spent on lobbying and campaigns last session was used against Democrats and Democratic Party interests. “I didn’t go to them,” Lewis said, “they came to me because I was interested in the issue.” Lewis, one of three Democrats who remain on Putting Children First’s Legislative Advisory Council, said he favors vouchers because of the extremely poor performance of the inner city public schools that his constituents are forced into. (The other Democrats still with Putting Children First are Ron Wilson, of Houston, and Laredo Representative Henry Cuellar, who sent Mansour a letter complaining about the letter that provoked Bullock’s resignation.) I asked Lewis if he had any objection to accepting campaign contributions from a group whose huge investment in elections is moving the state’s political center farther and farther to the right. “Texas politics?” Lewis said. “How could it get any farther right than it already is?” (For the answer to that question, Representative Lewis will only have to watch the next two election cycles.)

Yowza. I find it fitting that #FortWorth #Dallas #dfw creeps up here. In Fort Worth, *nobody* wants to send their kids to public school. Everybody fights over slots in private schools. One would have thought that democrats would look at the rightward slide they were in and come to the conclusion that, perhaps, veering leftward might have been the harder, but more foundationally sound, choice to make.

Also, not surprised to see that Cuellar was a shithead even back in the 1990s.

>He said he will take advantage of whatever resources are available to pass voucher legislation that will allow students to transfer from low-performing public schools to high-performing public schools. “I have a different agenda. The Republicans are in this for the privatization and the free market aspect. I want to improve the public schools,” Garcia said. “I support increasing teacher salaries and decreasing class size to eighteen.” But until schools, and in particular inner-city schools, are improved, Garcia said, he will work to pass a voucher bill that will require school districts with high academic performance to accept students from schools with low academic performance.

This is the *escape* mindset. It is a corrosive poison that has embodied the body politic of Texas for decades. We will not *escape* these problems. We must *meet* them, head on.

>“I have seven students in my district who want to transfer to suburban schools that refuse to admit them,” Garcia said. “They think if they accept these seven students, they’ll have a whole wave of transfers and their standards will fall.”

The classism and racism of suburbia strikes again. May we all read The Color of Law, please.

>Garcia’s pragmatic argument may seem to make principled liberal opposition to vouchers seem somewhat precious. But in historical perspective, the battle over school vouchers is not finally about vouchers at all; it’s about real racial integration in Texas (and U.S.) public schools.

Yep.

>Short term, these guys will use inner-city children as a first step, and even spring for a few tickets for poor minority kids to attend rich majority schools. In the long term, as Republican Representative Rick Williamson said after the House came as close as ever to passing a voucher program in the 1997 session, losing only on a tie vote (67-67): “We’re going after the whole system.”

And that is exactly what was done.

Subscribe to the Texas Observer, y'all.

The Texas Observer · Archives: Who's Paying for Public School Vouchers? (1998)"Somebody had to eat the first oyster." With that salty metaphor, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock makes the argument that elected officials shouldn't be afraid to try new ideas—in this case, vouchers that would shift taxpayers' moneys from public to private schools.