Stop The School Voucher Scam
Saying ABSOLUTELY NOT! To PHASE ONE of Greg Abbott’s School Voucher Scam
Greg Abbott wants to privatize your public schools.
And PHASE ONE of that process is to begin robbing those schools of your tax dollars to pay for the private and parochial education of wealthy kids, most of whom are already enrolled in those schools.
I say ”Phase One” because this first-round transfer of your tax dollars to the wealthy is not the end of scheme. Every subsequent Republican legislature will siphon off more public dollars, so starving our schools for resources that they can no longer meet their mandate, if they can even function at all.
And then, in the Final Phase, Republicans will declare once and for all that public schools are a failure altogether. That they must be uniformly privatized – statewide – in order to “save” them. With Republicans in charge of everything, there will be nothing to stop this outright theft, which likely will be completed by the end of this decade.
Only by electing a Democratic House of Representatives in time for 2025 can the voters render these unconstitutional schemes Dead-On-Arrival. We only need to flip twelve House seats to accomplish this.
Background
The TLDR for those who'd like a deeper dive.
Privatizing our schools is part of a larger billionaire effort to privatize public services more broadly. Now why would billionaires need or want to do this? The short answer, of course, is to maximize profit and wealth. But a more detailed explanation as to why follows:
- Four decades into Reaganomics and the neoliberal age of greed, billionaires essentially no longer pay taxes.
- Billionaires are able to access investment opportunities unavailable to the rest of us thanks to vehicles like private equity and their vast personal networks of key individuals and organizations.
- Potential rates of return on these opportunities far outstretch anything available to ordinary investors. The “power of compound interest” exponentiates the growth in value of these investments to dizzying heights.
- When these gains go essentially untaxed, the basis of compounding becomes many times greater than it would otherwise be, and the ultimately accumulated wealth becomes quite frankly obscene.
- After forty years, the ability of the billionaires to buy literally anything they want almost defies the average person’s imagination. In the past, they’ve been able to raid pension funds, and they’ve manipulated Congress into taxing Social Security benefits to pay for their own obscene tax cuts.
It is in this mind frame that billionaires seek to privatize public services. They’ve accumulated so much untaxed wealth that the real economy no longer produces sufficient investment opportunities to soak up all that capital. So, the billionaires must look for other investment avenues. Enter public services.
There are vast volumes of wealth invested in the public sector. These consist of government and other institutions that are owned by all of us collectively. They include our military, law enforcement agencies, administrative and regulatory bodies, the postal service, prisons, infrastructure like roads and waterways, and, of course, our public schools.
Some of these, like prisons and the postal service, have long been on the billionaires’ radar for privatization. They have now added public schools to that list.
The Billionaire Prime Directive
As a finance major in college, I was taught that the “corporate prime directive” is to maximize shareholder wealth. All other imperatives and aspirations are subjugated to this maxim and are pressed into the service of it. When it comes to privatizing a public service – which is only required to break even, just covering its cost – the Billionaire Prime Directive demands that it produce a profit. That’s the part of the income stream the billionaire gets to keep after all is said and done, and it’s what gets added to his wealth.
This means that two things must happen:
- Cash inflows (revenue/income) must increase
- Cash outflows (costs/expenses/future investments) must decrease
Bear in mind that the end users of these services – you and I – are the same whether they are publicly or privately owned. We are the ones ultimately paying for them, whether through our taxes or through private means like dues, subscriptions, or tuition. In order for this scheme to produce a profit, we end users must pay more and receive less. To put it bluntly, we’ll be receiving a diminished, inferior service and paying inexorably more for it. If that sounds like a good idea to you, then to paraphrase comedian Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a billionaire.
Bottom Line – There's No Excuse
For a state as wealthy as Texas, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE to be scraping the bottom in national rankings of public education metrics. But there is a reason for it.
That reason is Greg Abbott’s insistence on usurping taxpayer money to finance private school vouchers and enrich his billionaire backers. (I haven’t even mentioned that these men are also evangelical mega-church preachers who insist on using schools to force their religion on our children.) This MUST NOT be allowed to happen, and it won’t with a majority Democratic state house.
Today’s Republicans refuse to enact robust support for public education. This is the case even as Texas basks in budget surpluses; surpluses that are only there because Republicans have robbed our schools of their own tax collections! Is it any mystery why Texans are frustrated with high taxes?
Public school tax remittances to Austin must be slashed by greatly increasing per student allowances on local school spending. Greater minimums must also be established, and this must include giving our teachers a well-earned raise. These moneys belong to us, not the governor, and they must be wrested from his greedy grasp. We must elevate our rankings from the bottom to the top. We must do these things because we can. Being able, there is no excuse for anything less.
