Tuition-tax credit subsidizes wealthy
Jay Bookman’s follow-up column, “Ga.’s tuition-tax credit usually welfare for rich” (Opinion, Jan. 21), should hopefully put the nail in the coffin for this failed educational experiment, but I fear it will not. Instead of providing the state’s neediest children trapped in low-performing public schools with new, affordable opportunities for a good education, student scholarship organizations have largely carried out the law as a means to publicly finance the private education of relatively well-off students, with some exceptions.
Instead of saving tax funds, each of these private school scholarships in Georgia has cost the state significantly more than it would spend to send a student to public school. Tax-diverted funds for education should be used for the public good — not diverted to private purposes. It is time to end, or thoroughly overhaul, Georgia’s failed experiment in the tax-credit scholarships for private schools.
LESLIE WOLFE, ATLANTA
Tax proposal isn’t ambitious enough
I find the tax proposals in President Obama’s State of the Union address welcome but too modest and sadly overdue. He and all Democrats should stand up far more aggressively for the vanishing middle class. Income inequality is the worst it’s been since the Gilded Age. Conservative public policy has erased all the economic gains the New Deal gave the middle class and the poor. The richest 1 percent have grown spectacularly richer in the last 40 years, while median income has barely grown. And anyone raising the mildest objections to this modern-day feudalism is pilloried for waging “class warfare.”
But progressive populists like Elizabeth Warren are waking Americans up. Some of us have a message for the oligarchs and plutocrats and the politicians they own: We’re through begging for the crumbs from your feast. You can either agree to share the wealth, or we’ll take it from you.
CHRIS MOSTER, LITHONIA
Obama puts ego above nation’s unity
In his State of the Union address, President Obama said he would not have any more election campaigns to run. When that was met with a smatter of applause, he quickly retorted: “Yes and I won both of them.” What a wonderful expression to foster Congressional unity and a working environment. Your egotistical character was definitely showing.
BILL CEMBOR, SANDY SPRINGS
Time to redirect protester energy
I am sympathetic to those who protest what they perceive to be a wrong, particularly a wrong against themselves, but it seems lately that groups are protesting some general condition that doesn’t pose any personal detriment. These groups are quick to cite broad statistics in defense of their positions. It’s not hard to find data to support virtually any point of view with the willing support of someone in media.
Statistics are not proof of wrongdoing or entitlement to some sort of restitution. They can be misleading. It’s time for us to put our heads down and direct this energy toward solving the problems that limit the country’s success. The golden goose is running low on eggs.
RICHARD SOUREN, CANTON
