Bob Schaffer: “They might have thought to fix it too, but what they chose to do is ignore the problems, and that really gets back to…”

“They might have thought to fix it too, but what they chose to do is ignore the problems, and that really gets back to the beauty of tax credits. So from our perspective, the politicians here, the Members of Congress who deal with these dollars that come to the Treasury, every dollar spent on education really does come out of our budget. Every dollar spent results in a dollar reduced from the Nation's budget and, therefore, the ability to spend those dollars somewhere else. But by the time those dollars get down to the child, there is just a fraction of those dollars left. So the dollars spent does not have as much buying power as a taxpayer would hope and certainly as taxpayers deserve, certainly as much as children deserve. The education tax credit, it costs us money as well. We do have the budget for those dollars. The difference is we do not get a negative like you get here. In fact, you double it through the proposal that we are proposing because for every dollar that we have to budget for an education tax credit, because it is a 50 percent tax credit, what that means is that the taxpayer is donating $2 to the education charity of his or her choice. And, again, we have run the surveys. We have done the models, and we know Americans are eager to invest in schools when they know the money is really going to get there, and that is the beauty of tax credits because that is the promise that taxpayers get.”