A New Lucrative Wrinkle for Wealthy in MAGA’s “kill public education” Voucher Movement

 From Counterpunch, by Jeff Bryant:

. . . . An ‘Unprecedented Giveaway’ to the Wealthiest

It’s telling that the measure, originally called the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 when it was introduced and in committee, is now called “tax credit for contributions of individuals to scholarship granting organizations” and appears in the part of the [big awful pile of bullshit] bill devoted to “Additional Tax Relief for American Families and Workers,” rather than grouped with other education proposals in the Committee on Education and Workforce section.

But the subterfuge goes much deeper than the name, according to the speakers at the town hall, including Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), who called the measure“the quintessential definition of a tax shelter.”

The tax advantages are derived from how the program is funded. As Hanauer explained, school vouchers would be funded by a tax credit system and a federally mandated network of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs), one in every state. Each SGO is its own nonprofit that can grant vouchers to parents who apply. When private individuals and corporations donate to an SGO, they would, in turn, receive a tax credit from the federal government that’s dollar-for-dollar equal to the amount of the donation—limited to 10 percent of a donor’s income.

The first advantage is that the reward for donating comes in the form of a credit rather than a tax deduction, which, as the Tax Policy Center pointed out, increases the value of the tax advantage because a credit is “subtracted directly from a person’s tax liability,” while the value of a deduction “depends on the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate, which rises with income.”

Those specifics make the voucher program a more attractive system for giving than other charitable causes.

Also, “no other charity, not pediatric cancer research, not disaster relief, not assisting disabled veterans, nothing gets this level of tax incentive,” said Hanauer, “no other charity has ever gotten this kind of one-for-one payback.” . . .