Simple-minded numbers

by David Safier
Friend of the blog and Goldwater Institute employee Matthew Ladner had written his opinions of the Trib's articles about tuition tax credits and STOs on a blog where he posts occasionally.

Shorter Ladner: Tuition tax credits, good. Abuses of tax credits, bad, need to be corrected.

Those are the same sentiments he's expressed in his comments on BfA, and consistent with his overall world view. No surprises there.

I found one passage interesting, since it advocated greater regulation.

This points to something that often gets lost in the liberal/conservative and liberal/libertarian arguments. Most conservatives and libertarians aren't against all regulation. They just want regulation kept to a bare minimum. And liberals aren't for regulating everything. They just want sufficient regulation to keep businesses honest. It's generally a matter of degree. And in this case, Ladner agrees that tuition tax credits are under regulated.

Later in his post, Ladner returns to numbers he used in tax credit discussions here, and they deserve another look in light of the Trib articles. Ladner has the conservative's tendency to use simple-minded numbers to back up his assertions. He's smart enough to look further, but he and other intelligent conservatives combine two traits that make them appear stupid when they're not.

First, they shut off their critical thinking capabilities when they find a fact or statistic that supports their argument without bothering to analyze it or see if there is contradictory evidence. Their motto is, if the fact[oid] works, don't fix it.

Second, they dumb down their arguments so they can sell them to people who don't like to think. It must actually be difficult for some of them to say the idiotic things that come out of their mouths. The blatant lies spouted by conservatives in the health care debate are perfect examples. When I watched Bill Kristol taken apart by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show awhile back, Kristol looked like he was writhing in a combination of pain and embarrassment, having to defend his ridiculous contradictions in the face of Stewart's logical attacks. Yet he continued to try and defend the indefensible, his shoulders hunching lower and his face growing redder. I almost felt sorry for the guy.

With that in mind, let's look at one of Ladner's numbers.

That's true. It's also true that, if you look at Bill Gates and me, our average net worth is about $10 billion. It's true, but it doesn't tell you a hell of a lot, since the last time I checked, I didn't have anywhere near the kind of money Gates has.

We know from the Trib articles that lots of students get their entire private school tuitions covered by tax credits. The tuitions can be as high as $10,000. So if we're going to come up with a $2,000 average, that means lots of students have to receive very small scholarships — $500 to $1,000.

I'm going to make a guess that could be wrong. Well-to-do parents with well-to-do friends are the most likely to get "recommendations" from tuition tax credit donors, meaning  they get the largest scholarships. Needier children tend to get lower amounts. If my guess is right, it would demonstrate a gross inequity, where higher income people get far more in tax credit scholarship money than lower income people, and it averages out to $2,000 per student.

But even that isn't accurate. Also uncovered in the Trib article: parents go scholarship shopping and get money from different STOs for the same student. I'm guessing once again, but it makes sense that Ladner's $2,000 average should be far higher, because parents doubled and tripled and quadrupled up on their children's scholarships.

Finally, Ladner uses the $2,000 figure to show what a deal tax credits are, compared to average public school spending per child "just south of $10,000." (There you go again, Matthew, with another simple-minded number that's only accepted by G.I. and the politicians who love G.I. Even Tom Horne says it's garbage.) But the Trib article is very clear that a huge percentage of those students are already in private school and would be there with or without tuition tax credit money. G.I.'s Clint Bolick talks about sitting through a meeting where his child attended preschool. The parents were told how to use tax credits to pay for their children's kindergarten tuition. Most of the parents were already planning to send their children without the tax credit help.

Well-to-do parents getting their children's tuitions paid by tax credits. Parents getting scholarships for their children from multiple STOs. Parents who would put their children in private school anyway getting tax credit money to cover part or all of the cost. Put those pieces together, and Ladner's simple-minded $2,000 per student [and his conclusion that tax credits save taxpayers money since they move children out of more expensive public schools] falls apart.