Vouchers are great in a state where the education system is broken in spite of the fact that it is receiving adequate funding. They don’t work in a place where the education system excels in spite of funding shortfalls.

Not enough people will take vouchers in Utah and they’ll cost taxpayers more money that could have been used for better roads, better schools or better tax cuts.

Anyway…thanks for responding to me in your comments very cool of you. Good luck.

I stand by my argument that this is not sound policy. Sure, locals should chip in. Again, school districts may do so (and have) as needed. However, I don’t think the legislature needs to ‘incentivize’ tax increases for their funding. Again, school districts and their allies have lobbyists up on ‘the Hill’ who can persuasively argue that they have a need for more funding and can argue that the local tax burden is already sufficiently high to consider the community putting in their ‘fair share’. Legislators may then either propose the additional funding or dismiss it, if they feel the districts are not in true need of additional state funding. Further, funding could also be delivered on a criterion based method (ie not a ‘one gets, all gets’ mentality).

Regarding your final point, schools are always ‘underfunded’ no matter where in the country you are. Here, they have recently been given a huge increase in a state with tons of children and lower than average incomes. Ultimately, I feel parents are a much greater deciding factor in a child’s education than the amount of money thrown into a governmental system. Like you, I don’t have the time to debate this big issue in perpetuity, but hope you would be open to vouchers as an aid to curtailing the future funding shortfalls of public education due to the expected influx of new students (allowing a relatively small percentage of students to be placed in private schools would reduce infrastructure etc costs, while still providing schools at least 50% of the money for each student).

Finally, most low income families will be affected. Most rent and will not be exempted from a property tax increase as the property owner will not qualify and will pass the cost along in the form of their rent. Also, young/starting families (and fixed income folks) will also, likely, not qualify for such deferments and be further burdened.

The responsibility for funding public schools has to be shared between the state and the local school districts. Good fiscal policy requires that districts raise their fair share of the burden locally before the state’s part of the funding kicks in. It would be pretty irresponsible of the state to pass out taxpayer money without ensuring all parties are correctly working within the system to ensure funding burdens are distributed according to the law.

If you’d like to enlighten your understanding of how school funding works I’d recommend you check out the Utah Taxpayer Association blog. They’ve done a good job explaining weighted pupil units and the various sources of public school funding in the past couple months worth of posts they’ve put up.

You also might want to consider that charities and churches don’t pay property taxes before ranting about property tax increases. Low income families often qualify for abatements which exempt them from property taxes as well. In Davis County corporate properties are woefully under-assessed (compared to residential parcels) and they have been making out like bandits on property taxes for the past couple decades…so they aren’t hurting so badly either even with this minute increase.

Finally, since you seem to want to avoid a long discussion in this post we’ll hold off for now on talking about how incredibly underfunded our schools are and how asinine it is to gripe over legitimate efforts to attempt to remedy the problem.

My take is that it is anything but sound conservative fiscal policy to incentivize a tax-and-spend mentality with the current policy. If local schools need money, they can go ahead and raise taxes on their own (make the case to their community/direct users).

If the state (legislature) believes there is a statewide need or local area needs that can not be met without state funding (trust me school districts and their lobbyists will make that plainly clear at the legislature), legislators are welcome to provide that funding to qualifying schools.

Instead, a large chunk of money is dangled in front of districts with the message that [start infomercial voice] it is a time-limited offer and failure to act may result in a missed opportunity… [end voice] The catch? Increase the burden on families (especially low income), charities, churches, and small business etc even if you don’t really need to (ie don’t need the extra funding right now or it is sufficient without raising everyone’s burdens). Operators are standing by…

Like I said, a bad incentive by those claiming to be conservative lawmakers who oppose tax increases.