Credit where Credit's Due?

Ryan at Edspresso and Adam Schaeffer at Cato-at-Liberty are both drooling over NY gubernatorial candidate Elliot Spitzer's support for school choice. Joe Williams also notes that Albany, NY, charter founder Thomas Carroll is psyched about Spitzer's school reform cred. I'm quite happy to see a prominent Democrat like Spitzer embracing charter schools, but I can't share Ryan and Adam's enthusiasm about his support for education tax credits.

It particularly troubles me to see these tax credits being hyped by Schaeffer as a "third way" alternative to vouchers. If you're a moderate on these issues, you should actually find tax credits more troubling than straight-out vouchers, mainly because tax credits for private education have even less public accountability for how public funds are used than do vouchers. The second issue is a more wonky one, but in general, doing education spending indirectly through tax credits is less transparent and more complicated than spending funds for vouchers outright would be. There's also distribution: Unless tax credits are refundable and capped, you wind up subsidizing affluent people who are already sending their kids to private schools rather than expanding educational options for disadvantaged families. Basically, the only reason to go this route is to get around Blaine Amendments or because it's somewhat less politically controversial (for all the wrong reasons) than regular vouchers.

There could be a silver lining in all of this, however: The last attempt to create an education tax credit in New York got transformed, for political reasons, into a broad child tax credit. In contrast to education-specific tax credits, generalized child tax credits (particularly if they are refundable for low-income families) are a good idea, because they provide a general supplement to parents' incomes that they can use to help defray the costs of childrearing in whatever way best serves their families' unique needs (including in the early years when children are particularly costly and parents' incomes are often low). In these days of stagnating incomes, parents, particularly lower on the income scale, need all the help they can get.