The Public Record
Dutch-American politician and diplomat (born 1953)
What we have said is in some ways these people are accomplishing, these business leaders, because of their failure to exercise true leadership, are accomplishing what the terrorists could not. We bounced back after September 11, believing…
I mean when we are talking about what is the easiest and what is the fairest method for kids and for local taxpayers, this is the posture that clearly works. There is no bureaucracy, there is a lot of flexibility with how the money is…
Remember, this is the model that says the taxpayer puts in a dollar and 60 to 65 cents makes it to the classroom. On the other hand, this model says we have gotten rid of all this stuff in the middle and the taxpayer puts in $2, and it…
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 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…
It is exactly what we are finding at the State level. The important thing here at the State level, it shows the tremendous commitment that the American people have to education. Because there is significant money flowing, new money flowing…
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 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 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…
This is what we are talking about, bringing a massive infusion of new money into education. This is nontax credit money going into education for a very specific purpose. If we do a tax credit, we will see an entire map being red and…
They are not giving up on their local public schools. They are passionately involved in fixing their local public schools. They are passionate about helping the kids out that are falling through the cracks right now. So there are a number…
I think we have to be a little careful about calling them failing schools. I think what we have identified is that in those areas and other areas there are kids, for whatever reasons, that are falling through the cracks. It could be a…
What we are finding then in each of these areas is we are finding people who are going out and embracing these kids and trying to give them an answer to make sure that they will enter adulthood well prepared for high-quality, high-paying…
Well, basically, in the work my colleague and I have done in the Committee on Education and the Workforce, we have found that when a dollar goes into the Federal Treasury and then goes through the Department of Education and goes through…
That is it. That is what we are taking about, a $500 tax credit per individual, $1,000 for joint filers. That thousand dollars does not go through that bureaucracy any more; it goes directly from the taxpayer directly to Johnny's school…
$58 million. I think, going along the trend, you might be able to extrapolate that roughly the same if not more money will be flowing into traditional public schools. So that talks about the strength of this idea, $160 million flowing…
Tampa. We were down in Tampa. And we talked to a lot of parents and we talked to a lot of kids. And so we have seen hundreds and we have seen thousands of Joshuas around the country, and not everyone has an Ace scholarship, but what we see…
Does that analysis also take into account or talk about how much money they are projecting will be invested into the public schools, not into the investment scholarship funds?
I think the gentleman becomes very, very clear when he says government money. I think that came up at the hearing. What exactly is government money? Government money is only that money we have claimed and taken from the American people…
In the State of Arizona, more than half of the money is going to public schools, and it is not following one student who may decide to go to another public school, so it is not even following that. That money is being given by parents to…
The reason I made the comment about Pennsylvania was only because Madam Speaker tonight is from the great State of Pennsylvania, and the next time we have this discussion on where we are going with Federal tax credits, perhaps she can join…
What Joshua had to say was awesome. I mean, here we have a 10-year-old kid who is looking up at three rows of chairs and a row of Congress people up at the top, and very eloquently goes through his testimony and very eloquently answers the…
I think that is where, when we talk about education, the important thing that we always have to keep the focus on is the kids. And the criteria that we as policymakers have to really embrace is we need to put together a system that enables…
I think there are two features that make it especially attractive to our local schools. Number one, when we do this in Washington, it clearly is a new stream of money. It is not a diversion of money that would have been coming from…
But failure to act by the other body means that we do not get a stimulus package plus that our unemployed do not get the extension in unemployment benefits and they do not get the access to health care. So their inaction is hurting those…
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