John Ensign: “There have been many arguments on this, and sitting on the Committee on Ways and Means I heard many of the arguments by…”

“There have been many arguments on this, and sitting on the Committee on Ways and Means I heard many of the arguments by the other side of the aisle, and quite a bit of the class warfare was engaged in this debate. We had quite a healthy debate in the Committee on Ways and Means on the whole idea, whether this is going to be for the rich or the poor. Many on the other side of the aisle seemed to think that people in lower income brackets cannot save; that they do not have confidence in people in lower income brackets, even though there are many people in this country that are in low income brackets that are sacrificing for their children, that are saving, that are putting money together. There are a lot of lower income people that are even sending their kids to private schools. But this is not just about private versus public schools. This bill, 70 percent, it is estimated 70 percent of the money that is in this bill will go to helping students in the public schools. The old solutions for the public school systems have not worked. It is a disaster. In New York City, Washington, DC, most of the major cities around the country, the school zones, the public school zones are a disaster for our children. We need to care more about our children than we do about the educational bureaucracies, and those bureaucracies that protect the current status quo. We need to look for new answers. Forget about who we are protecting, other than let us think about the children.”