A number of political analysts have suggested that the Democrats used to win elections because they went around promising people all kinds of goodies. At the same time, the Republicans would throw cold water on the Democrats' proposals by saying that they'd cost too much. Recently, the Republicans have learned that they too can promise goodies, so voters are hearing lots of promises from Republicans as we get closer to November 3. But the Republicans avoid the question of financing the programs altogether. "Don't worry," they say. "We'll figure out how to pay for all this in the next budget cycle" -- in other words, after the election. "Trust us on this. And, by the way, we're going to decrease the deficit, too."
When he spoke at the Republican convention, the President promised an across-the-board tax cut, but he still has not given Americans a credible explanation of how he would pay for it. He has promised a $10 billion job-training program to retrain displaced workers and disadvantaged young people. This is a good idea in itself, but the President refuses to explain how he will fund this program -- until after the election. In fact, President Bush is running around the country making all kinds of costly promises and refusing to explain how he can possibly pay for them.
An outstanding example of this strategy is the so-called GI bill for kids, a school voucher program that the President and Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander have been pushing very hard. This program would give $1000 apiece to 500,000 children from low- and middle- income families in 50 communities to help them pay for a private school education. In other words, the bill now before Congress would cost taxpayers $500 million, which in terms of federal programs is fairly modest. But the GI bill for kids is an iceberg proposal of which we are seeing only the tip. The real costs are hidden and they are huge.
Let's forget for a minute about the public school students who might want to take advantage of the President's voucher program to transfer to private schools and look only at the students who are already attending private schools. There are about 5 million of them. The President's program would provide only 500,000 vouchers -- enough for one private school child in ten. What's going to happen if parents in Philadelphia learn that their city has not been chosen for the voucher program but Detroit or Albuquerque has? All over the country, low or middle-income parents who are paying to send a child to private school take the President's proposal as a promise that they are going to get help in paying the tuition. The President is encouraging them in this view -- they represent a lot of votes.
Giving vouchers to low-and middle-income families is also a kind of promise to the rest of the 5 million private school children and their parents that their turn is coming too. If its fair to help pay the tuition for some kids going to private school, it's fair for all of them. So the voucher bill is also an appeal for their votes.
If George Bush tried to limit vouchers to the original 500,000 kids, the parents of all the other children who worked and voted for him would feel an enormous sense of betrayal, just the way many taxpayers did when they found out the truth behind "Read my lips. No new taxes." And there would be enormous pressure for a $5 billion program instead of the $500 million program we're hearing about now.
But the costs would probably escalate far beyond $5 billion. A $1000 voucher is not much money. The argument of private school parents who support vouchers has always been that they are being doubly taxed: First they pay taxes for kids in public schools and then they tax themselves to send their own kids to private schools. They believe that it's only fair for the government to spend the same amount of money on their child's private education that it spends on another child's public school education. In other words, approximately $5,300 per pupil. Once the principle of using public money to pay for kids to attend private school was established, it would be hard to resist this argument.
What would this cost American taxpayers? Over $26,000,000,000 -- that's $26 billion -- a year, twice the $13 billion the federal government spent on K-12 education in 1991. And this is without counting the cost of giving vouchers to children now in public school who wanted to transfer to private school. If only 3 percent of these children moved to private school, the federal cost of the program would rise another $4 billion a year.
Has President Bush thought about how much his voucher program will cost? And has he thought about how it could become an entitlement that would undoubtedly grow year by year, the way medical costs have? Probably not, because what is mainly in his mind is winning a second term in November.
Not only are the mathematics of the President's proposal convenient; the argument itself has become twisted. Mr. Bush denounces those who want to use public money to support public schools as catering to "special interest groups." But he describes his own program, which involves giving public money to private schools, as being in the public interest. That's new math and Newspeak.