So, Governor Ayotte is moving us down the road towards universal eligibility for Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs).
Awesome! Now what will she do to move us towards universal eligibility for food stamps, and heating oil subsidies, and housing assistance?
While I don’t need any of those subsidies, I would certainly like to have them.
And those items are all at least as important as education. (While anyone would die without food, heat, and housing, our public schools have demonstrated that it’s possible for most people to live without education.)
It seems wrong to have one set of rules for one kind of welfare (education), and another set of rules for all the other kinds of welfare (food, heat, housing, internet connectivity, child services, and so on).
The GOP should bring those into alignment, now that it has control of both houses and the governor’s office. That would make things simpler, more efficient, more effective, and more fair.
Of course, the sensible way to bring everything into alignment would be to use means testing for all forms of welfare, including public schools:
https://granitegrok.com/new-england/nh/2025/01/groucho-marxism
Or better yet, to provide for education assistance in the exact same way that we provide assistance for other necessities that some people can’t afford:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/01/educaid
As an added benefit, setting up an Education Assistance Program (EAP, or Educaid) would allow us stop violating the state constitution by maintaining the public school system, which is exactly the kind of monopoly that is prohibited by Article 83.
All of which is to say, this is an opportunity for the ‘party of smaller government’ to put an end to the game of
How can we tinker around the edges of our failed (and unconstitutional) education system?
and start playing the game of
If we took our state constitution seriously, what kind of education assistance (if any) would we provide?
Ruth Ward et Rick Ladd removenda est
