“ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy task force, headed by Altria/Phillip Morris’ Amanda Klum and New Hampshire State Rep. Ken Weyler, added a Joint Education Finance Working Group at this week’s meeting [May 1-2 in Kansas City].
Why is a tax task force led by a cigarette lobbyist forming an education subcommittee? Perhaps to advance tuition ‘tax credit’ policies to subsidize charter and religious schools, a scheme dubbed ‘neo-vouchers’ by critics.
‘With conventional vouchers, the state effectively bundles tax revenue and distributes it as vouchers. With neo-vouchers the taxpayer and the nonprofits play that role, while the state backfills the funding, reimbursing the taxpayer,’ says critic Kevin Welner, a University of Colorado-Boulder professor who wrote a book on the topic.
ALEC’s Education task force has several tuition tax credit new vouchers on the books, and at this week’s meeting, it will consider adding an expanded ‘Educational Choice Tax Credit Program Act’ to the ALEC library. The bill would allow a 100% tax credit for the first five years of the program, which effectively means that both corporations and individuals can entirely reroute their tax dollars from public schools and services to private entities. The credit is then ratcheted down to 50% over the following five years. The bill specifies that even parents who are currently paying for private school tuition can receive funding through the program.
These ‘neo vouchers’ have been spreading across the country more quickly than traditional vouchers. The tax credit model provides a way to funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools with even less public accountability than with regular vouchers, and to bypass state constitutional provisions that have stood in the way of some state’s traditional voucher programs.” http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/05/12463/corporate-interests-calling-shots-week-alecs-kansas-city-meeting