Bill Archer: “I am somehow puzzled over and over again as I listen to comments from the other side of the aisle, and I just listened…”

“I am somehow puzzled over and over again as I listen to comments from the other side of the aisle, and I just listened to our previous colleague say that this takes dollars away from public education. That is totally, totally false, and he must know it if he has read the bill. Not $1 in this bill is taken away from public education. But we listen to this rhetoric spoken over and over again, on issue after issue, and I am sure that many Members might believe some of it. It just happens to not be true. What this bill does do is give parents an opportunity to save for their children's education, which they already have the opportunity to do so, and spend that money on college education. Those programs have not destroyed the public universities of this country, nor have they taken $1 away from the public universities to put into private universities. But for some reason, the Members on the other side of the aisle want to make people believe that what we are doing here today will destroy public elementary and secondary education. And nothing could be farther from the truth because all of the evaluations of this bill are that the savings that parents will put freely into accounts for their children will be used 75 percent for children in public education and only 25 percent for children who go to private schools. Now, that is the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of this bill. So let us get the facts straight.…”