Gee, thanks! Republicans make Taxpayers spend even more money on Private and Public Schools.

Raising property taxes to fund schools, public or private, would seem like something real “fiscal conservatives” (a myth) would howl endlessly over as a waste of their hard earned money. ‘We can’t throw more money at the problem…fire ‘em all, principals and teachers alike’ they would say.

Ideology over basic math-Are Conservative voters crazy? Yet Republicans are okay with taking money already going to their schools, and plopping that into a private voucher schools pocket. They would then raising their property taxes to replace it. To make things worse, they’re even okay with supporting two school systems at once as long as it vilifies those union filled classrooms.

This isn't very frugal or a good way to manage money to say the least. It’s vengeful, and what they believe.

The latest Legislative Fiscal Bureau figures on school aid cuts to voucher districts are big, and would eventually be made up by raising property taxes, unless they decide not to do that and finally do away with public schools. Of course those public schools mean an awful lot to the resale value of their homes, but that’s another story, and way too complicated for what is their bumper sticker mentality.

To the extent that pupils would have otherwise attended public schools, the pupil membership and aidable costs used to calculate general aid for that district would be lower … generally resulting in less aid for the district. Under revenue limits, districts would have the authority to backfill any aid loss with local levy.

But as I've mentioned before, the end game of the privateers is to get all the taxpayer money now going to public schools, matching funds so-to-speak. It won’t be cheaper and wipes out that old voucher talking point, but that’s okay, because they would have already accomplished their goal of ending pubic education.

Rock Netroots took an interesting look at this shell game of taxpayer dollars, by examining a comment by Rep. Sondy Pope and Politifact’s ridiculous analysis of that comment. Check it out. The point that I found most interesting was how much more voucher school were getting, and the huge percentage of districts receiving less. 

Sondy Pope on Saturday, March 30th, 2013 in a news release: "The vast majority of our public school students are receiving less state support than their private voucher peers."

She offered statistical proof: "The average public student receives roughly $4,900 of state general aid while choice students are guaranteed $6,442 in state aid. Over 80% of school districts now receive less than the voucher guaranteed amount." Those districts encompass more than 75% of all public school students. Pope’s decision to zero in on state general aid fits with her talking points about restoring state general aid cut in the last budget session.