Gary Hart: “in general, people are not happy with one system, and I think the reality of the tax credit, the voucher, whatever we…”

“in general, people are not happy with one system, and I think the reality of the tax credit, the voucher, whatever we are talking about, changing the system as it is, we improve each sector of it, and I think that is one of the arguments that has always been made for either a tax credit or school choice. What people tell me, and unfortunately too many people have told me, is that they cannot afford to send their kid to the school they want to. The individual tax credit that we consider here on the Federal level for parents who send their children to schools that require tuition is a wonderful thing, and it only makes sense for us to do that. Ultimately, a parent that chooses to send his or her child to a public school will end up getting a better education there as well. I think this is one of the things for many, many years that has been sort of talked about by a lot of people involved in public education. I am not really sure why a lot of them oppose this, because it does give them a number of different things. One, it gives them more opportunity to ease overcrowding which has become a huge burden and, of course, comes to us here in the Congress in the form of requests for dollars for new school construction. We could avoid a lot of that if we would spend much fewer dollars on a tax credit. We would find that we would not need those new school buildings.”