Dan Lips, Goldwater Institute
August 1, 2002
This 23-page paper was written for the Goldwater Institute by associate scholar Dan Lips. It uses the experience of Arizona???s 1997 education tax credit program to design one for the nation. According to the author???s estimates, such a program would cost the federal fisc about $3 billion per annum but, by enabling 1.6 million youngsters to shift from public to private schools, would save state-local taxpayers some $11 billion in public-school budgets. (Whether such a savings can in fact be realized depends, of course, on the elasticity of public-education budgets during a period of enrollment decline. Also uncertain is whether today???s private schools could accommodate that many additional pupils and whether a supply-side response would create more student slots.) It???s a worthwhile contribution to the continuing discussion of school choice via the tax code. Arizona Issue Analysis 173 is findable on the web at http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/113.html.
