This is people voluntarily writing a check to their local school district and saying, here, I will take the tax credit. Arizona is 100 percent tax credit. But, again, it is new money, and people are willing to let the schools decide where…

I think what will happen in the business world is that individuals drive the business community by the decisions they make as to where they work, where they buy their products from, what they invest in, who they loan their money to. Those…

The beauty of this system, and the example that I used is probably wrong because I said if a local public school squanders that money and does not use it wisely, they will not get the check the next time. I think what would happen, I think…

Really, we get three times the bang for our buck. Because when it goes through the system, it ends up with 60 cents. When you go with the tax credit model, you end up with $2 in your local classroom. Three times the 60, 65 cents, gets you…

That money is going to stay there. Matter of fact, it has been growing rapidly. It will probably continue to grow at a pace that is higher than the rate of inflation. And as my colleague well knows, as we have worked together on the…

Again, one of the criticisms that may come up, this will be a great program for your middle class suburban areas, for your wealthy school districts and those types of things. But when you take a look at what is happening at the State…

When we are dealing with the funnel, starting with the Federal bureaucracy and running through the Department of Education, running through the States, running through the State Department of Education, what happens is we end up focusing…

We try to figure out why the student in Colorado gets maybe $650, or the State gets $650 per child, and Michigan gets $635, and some other State maybe gets $675. It is how did this all happen and why does one State get more? We go through…

The other reason that I bring it up is I was with a group of business people on Monday, and we both know how business people complain about rules and regulations. They said, Are you guys doing anything to lift the burden of rules and…

It also gives a great liberty to our public school system, because what it does in our State of Michigan, basically, our public school superintendents who care passionately about the kids in their districts have become beggars to Lansing…

I think it holds great opportunity. It is not a perfect system, and it is not going to fix it by itself. Tax credits are not going to reform the system. But when you can combine the tax credits with H.R. 1, more parental choice, cutting…

This becomes a visionary system. That system does not understand vision. It says, no, I can only write them a check if they have filled out this form correctly. And if they after they have spent the money, if they have sent the forms back…

When we went to the 20 States with the Education at a Crossroads, every time we brought in a parent or a local school principal or a teacher, they always focused on the child. And the parents would come in and say, please, do this because…

Number one, whatever we do in education, the focus has to be on the kids. It has to be focused on Joe Ray. It cannot be focused on the bureaucracy or the system. So we have to keep the focus on the kids. The second thing is we have to keep…

The focus on the debate was not about what is good for the individual recipient at the end of the welfare stream, to give them a helping hand up, the whole debate was between the politicians as to who was going to control the spending and…

I think what the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania is pointing out, in Pennsylvania they have the tax credit and they have seen this kind of explosion of new funds moving into education. Even in the State of Michigan, where we do not have a…

The real question is where does accountability flow in that model? In that model the accountability flows from the school, to the politicians, to the school district, to the State Department of Education. It flows away from the local…

I think the language, they do not become beggars. This is a beggar system because it is a bureaucratic system. You have to fill the forms out right. You have to check the exact number of boxes. You have to dot the I's and cross the T's. If…

If my colleague will hold the chart up for a minute, the contrast between the two charts is absolutely phenomenal. My colleague's chart is exactly the way the system here in Washington works. The total emphasis here is on the stuff in red…

We increased their spending each and every year, even though they could not get a clean audit, and that is the bureaucratic model that says, well, being able to go back to the American people and getting a clean audit, that is not an…

If my colleague will yield, at the bottom level here, if you do not believe the system as my colleague and I are describing it, all you need to do is go to your local school and go to the administration building and ask them if they have…

The other thing that happens and like we said earlier, we do not threaten this system. We are not taking money. We are not shrinking this funnel. This funnel is going to continue to grow and expand. This funnel will be there for people who…

Remember, Mr. Speaker, this is for a very narrow purpose. This is for scholarship funds to assist kids to go to a private school, a private or parochial school. Just imagine what happens now when we expand this to a tax credit and they get…

the difference between what we are trying to do and how Members characterize vouchers, vouchers are typically viewed as taking the educational pie, the amount of money that we are investing in education and redistributing it so that means…

That system, with the tax credit, is going to stay in place. We are not going to take money out of that system, although that system takes out about a quarter to a third of every dollar that we commit to spending on education. When the…