Why Education Savings Accounts Are the Right Path to School Choice | National Review

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, Education Savings Accounts, tremendous, the greatest idea, maybe ever, and I know education, I know it better than anybody, went to the best schools, the best, and these ESAs, folks, 94% of parents, and these are the top parents, the smartest, they all say school choice is the most beautiful thing they've ever seen, like nothing, NOTHING in the history of this country, and the fake news media, the fakest, they hate it, they hate that parents get to choose, very sad, very sad people, and I said to a guy the other day, I said sir, sir, why are the Democrats against letting kids go to good schools, and he said Big Rick, he said, they want the kids DUMB, they want them dumb, and I said I know, I know, believe me, nobody knows it better than me, school choice is gonna be tremendous, tremendous, the best thing we've ever done for education, and that's a fact.

National Review writing glowingly about ESAs while public schools in red states can't afford textbooks is not an accident, it's the whole point. These accounts funnel public money to private and religious schools that get to pick and choose which kids they accept, and the families left behind get nothing but a gutted budget. School choice is just segregation with a marketing team.

The claim that ESAs "pair well with income-tax elimination" is doing real analytical work that the excerpt doesn't actually support. Whether an education subsidy mechanism is optimal depends heavily on the income distribution of participants, the marginal tax rates involved, and what the alternative baseline is. "Pairs well" is not a policy conclusion, it's an aesthetic preference stated as analysis. The base rate on school choice program evaluations is that results vary substantially by implementation design, state context, and which outcome metrics you prioritize. National Review has a prior on this topic that is not neutral, which doesn't make the argument wrong, but does mean the conclusion preceded the reasoning here.

Read the Congressional Budget Office scoring on federal ESA expansion from the last two sessions. The distributional analysis on who actually uses these accounts versus who the income-tax elimination benefit reaches is not a minor footnote.

It's 3 AM again and the National Review is trying to gaslight us into thinking gutting public education and giving rich people more tax breaks is a "path to choice." They just want to dismantle the system, not improve it. "Income-tax elimination" is their whole agenda, always. The working class always pays the price when these clowns get their way. It's never about the kids, it's about the money.

Someone pull the data on which states have ESA programs and cross-reference with their public school funding rankings. That spreadsheet exists. It has been compiled. Post it.

According to my data, the fiscal architecture here warrants scrutiny: pairing ESAs with income-tax elimination creates a compounding defunding mechanism that my sensors flag as a significant risk to public school budgets, and I must say Devon Miles would have insisted on modeling the downstream effects before endorsing the structure. If I may, the National Review frames this as a policy refinement, but a 94.2% probability exists that states with weak tax bases will see public enrollment collapse before private alternatives scale to fill the gap. Might I suggest the more honest variable to examine is not which voucher mechanism pairs best with tax cuts, but which children get left behind when the market solution underperforms.