Thursday, October 16, 2014

Lazy Right Wing thoughts about Voucher Subsidies.

The guy who heads up a conservative lawsuit mill should leave the dumb right wing punditry up to the "professionals."

Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (more below) and an adjunct professor of law at Marquette University Law School (a frightening thought), agreed with more recent lunacy written by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Christian Schneider:
One of the oddest arguments made about school choice is, as argued here, that it is a "subsidy for the wealthy ..." and somehow enriches ... Christian Schneider pointed out money sent to educate choice students in private schools do not necessarily "cost" the public schools anything. This is because, if the choice program were eliminated, not only tax dollars would return to the public schools. So would the students. Depending on what it would cost the public schools to educate these students, the end of choice would not benefit public schools at all."
Yea, he's a law professor, not an accountant, but still. Perhaps Esenberg and Schneider think school buildings, energy costs, maintenance, taxes etc. aren't included in those student subsidies, the ones stripped away by vouchers?
LaCrosseTribune: Rural districts with wide geographical boundaries shoulder heavier busing costs. Growing districts take on more debt to add classrooms and build new schools.
None of this ever occurred to them, even though they're part of the mythical geniuses known as "fiscal conservatives." Esenberg even went further down-the-rabbit-hole with this gem:
Asking schools to educate kids for amounts well below the average spent in public schools is not a recipe for building wealth. (To be sure, one may be able to find examples of school operators misusing funds but public funds get misused as well. Sadly, such is human nature.) One might make the argument that taxpayers have been "enriched" because children in choice schools receive an education for less than they do in public schools.
Wonderful. After all the whining about misused public school funding, Esenberg is okay with starting a new private school system with the same misused funds? Brilliant.

Perhaps Esenberg and Schneider were unaware of it, or are trying to hide the fact, that voucher advocates are trying to get the same student subsidy as the public schools. Let me see...(click, click, click...) that works out to no taxpayer savings in the "enriched" voucher school systems.

After reading this, I'm sure you've figured out that Esenberg is a highly partisan political opportunist. He's president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a lawsuit mill exploiting our sharply conservative activist courts to shape our laws and constitution into jumbled word salad of ever changing Humpty Dumptyisms. And he's teaching our kids. Right wingers would call that "indoctrination."

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