State Senator Mike Doherty (R-23) (I believe he is Matt’s twin brother, obviously separated at birth) has put together a plan to dump the Marxist (from each according to his ability, etc etc) school funding formula currently being forced on us by the State Supreme Soviet Court. His proposal, dubbed the “Fair School Funding Plan”, actually respects our right to equal protection, a real right, not one of the imaginary “rights” that our “black-robed leftists gone wild” in Trenton dream up.
The plan is beautiful in it’s simplicity: divide the total revenue from the state income tax by the total amount of students in the state and send that amount to each town for each student they have. It comes out to about $7500 per student and it would increase Belmar’s share of state aid by $3,126,908! We could all enjoy a great big permanant tax cut.
Senator Doherty explains thusly:
I would still prefer to see the money attached to the students, and not just dumped into the public education wealth-destruction machine. The parents could then spend the money at the school of their choice, not the one dictated by their zip code. Schools would need to compete for students, which would actually create the incentive needed to improve. And parents (like me) who send their kids to private or parochial schools would not be paying twice for their kids’ education. Doherty is having a townhall meeting at the Colt’s Neck library May 23 and I plan to attend and ask him about this.
I also would like to see the plan funded from the sales tax, not the income tax. As I’ve written about before, income and capital gains taxes are taxes on wealth creation and thus are a brake on economic growth. We need to get rid of them if New Jersey is going to attract productive enterprises. To the extent that we need taxes (and if I were in charge that would be a fraction of the extent that we are now suffering) all taxes should be on consumption, not production. This would encourage savings which is where the “capital” to be used in “capitalism” comes from. And we still want capitalism, don’t we?
* BTW, Mike Doherty supports Ron Paul. So at least one Doherty in the government “gets it”.
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