I’ve been thinking: It seems silly for Georgia to offer tax credits for electric cars and solar energy equipment. Don’t we already have an Environmental Protection Division to handle all things “green”? Besides, the money might end up in some company’s bottom line when it could have been spent cleaning up a river. I think I’ll sue.
Sound ridiculous? It’s no more ridiculous than a new lawsuit to end one of Georgia’s most popular school-choice programs.
Georgia’s tuition tax-credit scholarship (TCS) program does just what its name suggests: Georgians can get a state tax credit for contributing to groups that award private-school scholarships. Since 2008, it has helped tens of thousands of children attend the schools of their choice, saving taxpayers money along the way.
Unfortunately, also since 2008, anti-choice outfits have sought to limit or kill the program.
The latest attempt is a lawsuit filed in Fulton County earlier this month by four Georgians backed by the liberal Southern Education Foundation. The breathtakingly broad suit threatens not only the TCS program, not only any type of school choice outside public schools, but arguably your church’s property-tax exemption — and, yes, that electric-car tax credit.
What passes for logic in the suit flows from a misconception that has already been settled legally: that tax credits represent public spending.
Just three years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case involving Arizona’s tuition tax-credit scholarship program, clarified that tax credits don’t come from the public purse:
“Like contributions that lead to charitable tax deductions, contributions yielding [student tuition] tax credits are not owed to the State and, in fact, pass directly from taxpayers to private organizations. [The] contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. That premise finds no basis in standing jurisprudence. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the Arizona State Treasury.”
And yet, on page 2 of the new lawsuit, Georgia's TCS program is described as "a scheme in which funds from the State's treasury are redirected to pay tuition at private schools in the State" (emphasis added). The plaintiffs go on to claim, among other things, the program illegally funds parochial schools and keeps the state from fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide an adequate public education to all.
Never mind that, as the justices in the Arizona case noted, the state cannot deem as “public money” income it has chosen not to tax.
Never mind, too, that ending the program and sending the 13,000-plus students it serves each year back to public schools would actually reduce per-pupil funding in this state.
Never mind as well that the same Southern Education Foundation last year lobbied legislators to restrict the TCS program to low-income families, saw its provision changed so income is but one consideration for the scholarships, and is now essentially suing as if the law had been written the way it wanted.
The premise that some private decisions are tantamount to public ones when money and education are involved is an insidious notion Georgians, and Georgia’s courts, should reject.
