Back to School
School-choice advocates consider an alternative to vouchers.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
July 27, 2001 1:55 p.m.

here has been a revival of interest on the Right in tax credits for private-school tuition, both because school vouchers have had so little political success and because tax credits are less likely than vouchers to bring about government regulation of private schools. Andrew Coulson, the author of Market Education: The Unknown History, made the case that school-choice proponents should back tuition tax credits rather than vouchers for the Cato Institute earlier this year.

In a recent issue of Imprimis, Lawrence Reed, head of a free-market think tank in Michigan called the Mackinac Center, makes an additional point for the superiority of tax credits that we hadn't considered before: "[M]ost people are naturally more sympathetic to tax credits because they are more familiar with them…having already used them year after year. When a voucher plan was on the ballot in Michigan in November 2000, yard signs popped up all over the state declaring 'No Vouchers!' It's hard to imagine a similar proliferation of 'No Tax Credits!' signs, had that been the choice before voters…. It is not surprising, then, that of all the statewide ballot initiatives for educational choice in the past 30 years, the one that holds the record for securing the greatest percentage of the popular vote is the 1998 Colorado tax credit initiative (about 41 percent). It was poorly crafted, underfunded, and it came out way too late for its proponents to have enough time to inform the public. But it still beat by a good margin the highest popular vote than any voucher plan has ever won."

Faux Federalism
On our website today, Benjamin Domenech takes on Steve Chapman's argument, in the Weekly Standard, against lowering the drinking age to 21. While we're generally fans of Chapman, whose work has appeared in NR, on this one we're with Domenech. We'd add one point about Chapman's discussion of whether the drinking age should be nationally uniform. Chapman writes that "federalism, correctly understood, doesn't mean leaving all decisions to the states — only those decisions whose consequences are largely confined within their boundaries. If California chooses to bar construction of power generators or New York levies high taxes, its citizens will pay the price. But we don't let one state foul the air of its neighbors at will, or block goods and services coming from elsewhere." Keeping kids from crossing state lines to drink, and then driving back home, is another case where federal intervention is warranted.

Whatever else may be said of this understanding of federalism, it is one that leads to a more expansive role for the federal government than either the classical understanding of the country's founders or even the post-New Deal one. Almost any state decision can be depicted as having spillover effects: California's generation restrictions, for instance, could be said to reduce the supply of electricity available and raise its price nationally. Even legislators in the modern era, who are not particularly sticklers for federalism, have been reluctant to claim a direct federal role. That's why Congress never enacted a law simply setting a national drinking age or ordering the states to do so. It felt it needed a fig leaf, merely offering the states an "incentive" to raise their drinking ages — albeit a big one (they would lose federal highway money if they held out).

On the Site
Melissa Seckora on Sen. Ted Kennedy's latest attempt to pass hate-crimes legislation.