Governor Hassan and the Dems are determined to repeal the school choice law enacted last session. Funded by tax credits granted in exchange for donations, the school choice program would provide scholarships to economically disadvantaged children to help them escape unsafe or unsuitable public schools. It would free children held hostage by a zip code to attend a school where they would be free from the shackles of poverty to learn at their own pace in an environmental more suitable to their learning needs. And for the life of me I could not figure what has the Dems and progressives with their undergarments all in a twist until I took at look at the most recently available tax return of the NH National Education Association. Could it be that they just don’t care about poor children? Or could it be that the NEA, a private, tax-exempt corporation with a near monopoly over publicly funded education, finds itself potentially threatened by a loss of tax-exempt revenue?
Concord Rep. Mary Stuart Gile, a Democrat and chairwoman of the House Education Committee, in opposing the education tax credit law, said that “It does not make sense to continue a program to voluntarily decrease state revenue collection in business taxes,” she said.
Courtesy of Guidestar.org, I offer the most currently available (year-ending December 2011) tax return of the NH NEA (following).
To paraphrase Chair Gile, the Dems’ friends at NH NEA were allowed to ‘decrease state revenue collection in business taxes’ by $6,767,762. You say wait a minute, that’s not accurate. Well, it kinda is because every NEA member who paid dues to NH NEA was able to deduct those dues from their own personal income taxes. And, in examining the tax return, one can see that NH NEA had expenses of $6,474,132, leaving them with only a pitiful and hardly worth taxing $293,630 at the end of the year. But of those $6,474,132 in expenses, $4,826,683 went to pay the salaries and benefits of NH NEA employees!!
The education tax credits are ‘capped’ at under $4 million per year, meaning that even if every business in New Hampshire wanted to donate, once $4 million was reached, no more donations could be accepted. Seems kind of ironic that the limit placed on education tax credits to help poor kids would not cover the salaries and benefits paid to the employees of the private, tax-exempt corporation that is NH NEA.
I’m just sayin…and just in case you’d like to see the whole tax return – did I mentione they give away pocket calendars, too? – go to Guidestar.org, register (anyone can and it’s free), search for NEA and it will get you to NH….
