Maurice Hinchey: “it seems that the leadership of this House has taken another poll; and in that poll, they discovered that the people of…”

“it seems that the leadership of this House has taken another poll; and in that poll, they discovered that the people of this country are concerned about the quality of education that their young family members are getting. So they come up with this brilliant idea to provide a tiny little tax cut for private schools. This tiny little tax cut would amount to somewhere in the neighborhood of between $5 and $10 a year to families in my district. That is not even enough to buy a single textbook. That is how meaningless and disgraceful this piece of legislation is. Instead of doing what we need to do, this offers a false hope to people. We know what is wrong with education in our country. We know that we need more teachers. This bill does not do a thing to provide more teachers. We know that we need smaller class sizes. This legislation does not do a thing to provide us with smaller class sizes. We know that we need an infrastructure improvement program to build classrooms and to upgrade schools and existing classrooms. So many of the classrooms, most of them, are so old in this country, they cannot even be wired for the Internet. They need a complete overhaul in the wiring of the school system. This is what we need, and this is what the ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means is offering us in his motion to recommit.”