262 Comments

Religious schools should not get one cent of public money, directly or indirectly, for any reason. It isn't as if the struggling public schools are going to be able to maintain their funding levels. That children appear to do better in private schools is due in no small part to the fact private schools get to select who may attend. This is all about backstopping religion, which is never the job of our secular government. Greg Abbott is hell-bent on creating a voucher system, even though over 80% of the people who would receive them already attend private school. The great majority of Texas school children have no viable private option. Tax payers would be subsidizing the wealthy in the large cities.

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Feature not bug.

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And we all know that the schools would simply raise tuition by an amount asymptoticly approaching the voucher value.

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Putting aside the obvious issues about religious indoctrination, underfunded public schools, church-state separation and leaving behind kids with needs, my issue is that organizations that don't pay tax are taking taxpayer money. Here in AZ some of the best real estate has churches on it. Private schools also tend to be in good areas. Neither pay property taxes. Yes, in AZ there is a property tax exemption for schools and libraries. This exemption doesn't mean much for public schools because they are owned by the government but for the for-profit private schools this is a boon. It's no wonder we have so many "patriot academies" and "leadership schools" here. These organizations are tax-sucking leeches who now have a friendly Supreme Court.

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“No taxation without representation. “

Thanks to the Reichpublicans, those who are taxed have no representation while those with representation are not taxed.

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I live in Ohio, and I don't mind telling you, school vouchers PISS ME OFF! They are a parasite on the public school system, which is generally hurting in the Buckeye State to begin with, and I'm not convinced that any of those schools getting voucher funds are doing a better or even equal job, compared with some school districts.

Years ago, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that using property taxes to fund our schools was unconstitutional and demanded that the state submit a more equitable plan. To date, I have heard NOTHING about any such new scheme, and I doubt I will any time soon. Were such a plan to emerge and be implemented, it would be interesting to see what would become of the private schools which had gained their payrolls with vouchers.

No, I'm NOT holding my breath.

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Those private schools only appear to do better. They can be selective in their enrollment, so they can keep out the poors. Then the legislators pushing the vouchers can say: "See, those poor schools are doing even worse now, let's give even more voucher money to the m̶a̶d̶r̶a̶s̶a̶ private school so our (wealthier) kids can have a good indoctr, um, education. (Which we can make the poor pay for.)

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Not just that, but many of these private schools aren't held to the same standards and they don't have any state educational oversight like the public schools do - this of course is all by design from the Republicans and their friends like Hillside. Also, many of these schools do not require teachers to have actual College teaching degrees.

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Yes, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy – under fund state-run enterprises and claim they don't work so you can eventually privatise them. Or just leave them underfunded so your kids won't have to mix with nasty poor people.

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It's a twofer, isn't it? Undermine public education and reinforce theocratic educational models.

Bottom line? I shouldn't have to support religion indoctrination through the taxes I pay.

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They also funnel tax dollars into private hands.

Republicans have been drooling over the big pile of money states spend on schools trying various schemes to get their hands on it.

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Jun 7
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Exactly, and then when the financial institutions mismanage our social security investments, they will want the government and taxpayers to bail them out.

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Reichwing politicians are looking at the taxes that go to public schools as a per student fund, something the education system has to do to disburse the moneys to schools in a semi-fair manner, but that is not really how taxes for public services work. Yes, there is a breakdown of how much money per student per year is spent, but funding public schools is not about individual students. We pay taxes to have a public school system available to the community. Even if your household does not have school aged children, or children that attend public school, or even if you never step foot in a single public school, the public school benefits you, it increases your property value, it provides services for the community, it draws in businesses and it provides jobs. Why property owners are so willing to defund the school districts in their communities so that they perform poorly is beyond me. It is shooting yourself in the foot to underfund the school. So what if your kid doesn't attend the school, the children in your neighborhood do, and if they aren't being educated they end up becoming hooligans, or unemployed and on the streets, in your community. The fact that the vouchers have surpassed the budget for schools in some areas is hilarious. What did they expect? So, now the wealthy folks have even more than everyone else. Who is surprised by this? Not me, I knew from the get go that that was what was intended all along. But then, when you look at the system in an individual point of view, that is what you get.

Those breakdowns don't work to distribute the funds to the individual families. They rely on numbers that are fractions of costs spread out over an entire school or district. The individual cost of supplies, for example, takes the amount of money a school spends on copy paper in a year and divides it between every student. It doesn't, however, really reflect how much paper an individual student actually uses in that year, some use more, some less. These numbers only reflect what a school has accomplished for the year for all the students, and guide them on how to be more efficient. To try to take that money and give it to an individual to accomplish the same thing, you're not going to get as far, because you won't have bulk pricing, or government discounts, or clear estimates in quantities you really need.

These money grubbing parasites also sold the public on the vouchers by implying that they would make private schools more affordable, but the private schools proved them wrong by increasing tuition as they started receiving the vouchers. So, even with the vouchers, fewer people can afford to send their children to the private schools. Which is exactly what the proponents of the vouchers want. They want to eliminate the public school system, and make private schools out of reach for the majority of families, so that they are the only ones who get to educate their children. Because the poor have been able to succeed lately and they aren't as controllable as they were when everyone but the super wealthy were illiterate.

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And with the uneducated poor comes the relaxing and elimination of child labor laws, so the idle rich can more directly exploit the poor. The religious indoctrination helps keep the poor unaware of the exploitation. Just one of the many tentacles of their preferred power structure.

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Feudalism and slavery benefited their ancestors, that's why they want to return to it. They forget that it often ended in guillotines and axes and a whole new crop took over.

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The wealthy and powerful 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 those systems benefited their ancestors... but most of their ancestors were probably serfs or indentured servants or slaves themselves at some point. They just only like to pay attention to the particular branch that conferred their current high status on them, rather than the whole rest of the family tree.

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Bingo, the private schools then jack up the tuition!

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A catholic school in Tampa did that and caught a lot of flak for it.

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I'm sure they needed the money to hire more lawyers to defend their child abuse or something.

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𝑻𝒂𝒙𝒑𝒂𝒚𝒆𝒓 𝒅𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒓𝒔 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒏𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒃𝒆 𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒑 𝒖𝒑 𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒐𝒏.

Say it louder. The right wing theocrats are having a hard time hearing it with their ears stuffed with cotton.

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That they didn't pick.

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My gut feeling, America is going to fail or it’s going to have to have a comeuppance. We were on our way out before WWII but thanks to the war and the Great Depression that shocked us back into a bit of common sense. Unfortunately the next thing could exterminate the world.

I put this back on the Trump/Clinton campaign when friends that I don’t consider friends anymore, had to vote for Jill Stein because Hillary was just somehow icky to them, Maybe it was her pants suits. Well they showed Clinton and gave us three corrupt Supreme Court justices they were probably the last few nails we needed in our coffin. Ironically we have pictures of Jill Stein sitting at the table with Putin in Moscow, Putin understood exactly Jill’s value in playing an arrogant and stupid “liberal”

I think Jill also knew her value to Putin. The only thing she cares about is running for president as a living.

Now we have a huge majority of openly corrupt Supreme Court justices that are going to pave the way for Christian fascism in America.

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Arizona's program is in real trouble. They estimate the cost of vouchers will be almost a billion dollars for the 2024-2025 school year. And not one Republican who voted for the program has come up with a solution (which means rural schools will take the hit).

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Yeah I read that a few weeks ago, the AZ governor wants to shut it down. Iowa and Ohio also have massive cost overruns, deficits from all the money they're giving to religious voucher scams.

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Good I guess? They are the gop's most reliable voters so they should suffer. Sucks for their kids though.

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They will refuse to see who actually caused their suffering, though. Instead they will continue to blame the democrats/commies/liberals/woke (the labels are interchangeable in their minds) for all of their problems.

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Drag queens and the transgender too.

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We're (LGBTQ2SAI) responsible for their children thinking they're cruel and stupid.

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sadly

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You think it's good to take public dollars away from rural schools and use them for religious schools? Because of how their PARENTS vote?

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Yes.

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Considering the fact that younger voters tend to vote for Democrats, this kind of self defeating attitude is why we can't make inroads with rural voters (who aren't a monolith and don't all vote MAGA).

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Well maybe. I would also say that in general younger voters do not vote. Partly because we don't teach civics in school. I am aware rural voters are "not a monolith" but they consistently vote gop 70%.

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The Republic is being chipped away one SCOTUS ruling after another. I would like to see a direct comparison of dollars per student in these states for public verses private schools. I would also like to see parents of public school students band together and sue to demand equal funding for their kids. I can hardly wait to see the legal gyrations the Supremes go through to deny public school kids a level playing field.

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Utah has already had a lawsuit filed in regards to the vouchers- or rather, the lack of oversight into what the money is actually funding. Because the money can go towards homeschooling and not just private schools, there's no real accountability for where the money goes.

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Maybe there is some small hope.

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Trips to Disney World.

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Hey, that's an educational field trip. Epcot. It's like a low-rent science museum with a roller coaster. And then there's the World Showcase. Every stereotype you can think of in a couple of square miles.

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Not Epcot, the Magic Kingdom.

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I suspect most teachers in the southern Republican states actually vote Republican - this should be a wake-up call to them. The funding of public schools in many of these Republican states, especially the south, is already in the bottom percentile compared to all 50 states, they already deliberately underfund public education even without the school voucher scam the Republicans set up a deliberate system of discrimination.

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They would like to not spend one red cent on 'THOSE' people. They surely don't want them in their private schools.

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So grateful my state doesn't allow this bullshit to take place.

And what's with the GOP having their hands out for tax money? I thought they hated taxes. It's their top core value.

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They don't like their tax money going to *those* people. As long as it benefits them, everyone else paying taxes is a good thing. They need to pay even more.

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Just like they assert that "deficits don't matter" when a Republican sits in the Oval Office, then scream BUDGET DEFICIT! when a Democrat is President.

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...and when the deficit they're bitching about was because of what 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 did when 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 guy was in the big chair. The deficit has long tended to shrink under Democrats and grow under Republicans.

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Bill Clinton balanced the budget, paid down the debt and got us a surplus. Gore would have continued building on that. Instead we got Bush, who blew through the budget surplus like a drunken sailor on weekend leave.

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And Gore wouldn't have started a forever war.

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Well, he had to finish what Daddy started in Iraq while Anti-Muslim sentiment and fear gave him carte blanche.

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They LIVE hypocrisy.

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They just hate taxes they can't line their pockets with.

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Mine either

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Public schools have enough trouble these days without adding religious nuttery/fuckery. (Side note: Not all public schools are created equal. I couldn’t send my kids to our local public school (which broke my heart because it was the one I attended) because they had no after school care. The hoops I had to jump through to get them into one that did was ridiculous). I’d never have sent my kids to a religious one cuz indoctrination. I know a lot of people who sent their kids to private school, not because they were wealthy, but because their local schools were a mess. Not one of them were religious schools and the parents paid out of their own pocket. I understand the problem in a rural community, but this just shows that people who don’t want to publicly fund education don’t give a damn. The ones who will suffer are the kids, courtesy of the GOP because they need folks un or under educated to serve their whims.

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Why is any organization that receives taxpayer $$$ simultaneously allowed to discriminate?

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Because they think they CAN.

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Not really.

It's because nobody stops them. So they really can.

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The people who are supposed to stop them think Christianity is the way to turn out "good" people. (Useful to the billionaires) And millions support them because Christianity is what keeps people moral. Despite all the evidence to the contrary. These people can't tell the difference between a "few" bad apples and "a third of all apples".

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That, too. 😝

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Christianity rakes in billions every year and pays no taxes. Where is all that money going? Are they listening to their messiah's words for once and truly feeding, clothing and housing the needy in an ongoing way?

(Oh, brother. Who am I kidding?) *rolls eyes*

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about 1% of preachers. Another 40(?) get a good amount. Luxury Cars, high end homes, no other job. Then there's the ones who believe the hype and are living a basic low-middle class life and holding down some kind of flexible second job.

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It's going to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

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Trump is vetting J. D. Vance for the VP spot, which does no one any favors. 😝

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Copeland needs another jet. Won't somebody think of the televangelists?

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How else can he avoid riding around in a tube full of demons?

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There's only one demon in that tube and it stares at him every morning from the mirror.

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He looks so natural in Joker makeup.

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The Joker had better morals.

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Besides, God won't let him borrow the starship.

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Since Arizona got called out, I think it might be helpful to add some slight background here. Here in AZ, there is a massive voting bloc called the LDS church that votes Republican every chance they get, no matter who is running. If Joseph Smith showed up on the Democrat ticket, they'd probably still vote for whoever had the R instead. Well, the Republican party has things set up so that for the most part, the lottery and property taxes support public schools, which would be fine if the last time the state voted to approve a property tax hike they hadn't found ways to drain that money away from public schools. They've done this before, where the voters have approved something that meant more money for public schools but somehow the public schools system never saw the additional funds. Sure, the batch of Republicans that actually did that might have been voted out of office, but they got replaced by Republicans just like 'em, so it's not like there's been any significant change.

Here in AZ, vouchers are just one more way for the Republican party to drain money out of the system with the goal of destroying public education entirely. The death grip they have on the government is completely traceable to the LDS voting bloc who don't care what policy they promote so long as they have an R next to their name. As a result, Arizona has virtually zero control over its own government, even though we still have elections. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, Arizona is the asylum where the patients are demanding to get more shock treatments.

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Obligatory

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/575142

Specifically, he said this to Rev. Richard Price in a letter dated October 9th, 1780

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To add:

Funny how the meme in this article is a rosary on top of a pile of Benjamins, considering what Franklin had to say about good and bad religions.

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