As mentioned in [Part 1], the most straightforward (and least Marxist) way to fund schools would be to use a uniform (per capita) tax. You take the budget, divide it by the number of taxpayers, and that’s the tax each one pays.
But even that ends up implementing a sort of reverse Marxism, taking money from the poor to give to the rich. For example, in each of our districts, a person with no children who is living on a fixed income of $25,000 per year, could end up putting $2000 towards the schooling of the child of a person with an income of $500,000 per year.
With other forms of welfare, we impose means testing. People who can afford to buy food, or heating oil, or housing, or whatever, go ahead and do that; and people who can demonstrate that they can’t afford it get assistance on a sliding scale.
There is no reason not to do the same thing for education. Any parent who wants to make use of public schools or EFAs should fill out the paperwork needed to determine how much of the cost he can come up with. The district, and the state, would step in only to fund shortfalls.
For example, a parent with three children, who lives in a district that spends $25,000 per student, might be able to come up with $30,000 of the $75,000 that the district would spend on his kids. A per-capita tax, levied on people without children, would provide the remaining $45,000.
Here’s how that might look in one of our districts, where the per-student cost is $20,000, and parents could, on average, pay $8,000 of that.
| Non-parent taxpayers | 950 |
| Parents | 50 |
| Students | 100 |
| Budget | $2M |
| Parent contribution | 100*$8,000 = $800,000 |
| Non-parent contribution | $1,200,000 |
| Non-parent tax | $1,200,000 / 950 = $1,263.16 |
It’s simple, it’s minimally Marxist, and it reflects the reality that since people are the ones who are supposed to benefit from an educated citizenry, it should be people — and not property — that get taxed.
Also, as explained in the Federalist Papers, a per-capita tax places natural limits on growth, since you can’t have a tax that can’t be paid by even the poorest members of the community. You want to see costs come down, and a focus on fundamentals regained, this is how you do it.
