Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

> To balance it out, you would need some sort of region wide tax on private school attendance. If you want to opt out, you gotta pay. That would never happen so...back to the drawing board.

I don't understand this. That tax already exists; everyone [0] pays for public schools regardless of whether they have children in the system. If you send your children to private school, you are paying for both public and private school. If you don't have children at all, you are still paying for public school.

[0] Of course, "everyone" likely means "every property owner", as school taxes are usually property taxes.

View on HN

Money isn't the problem (sans disastrous allocation policies like No Child Left Behind). There are dozens of compounding network effects that can make or break a school district and having students with wealthy families is an important one that benefits all students. Wealthy families have more money and time to get involved with the teachers, district governance, PTAs, fund raisers, and extracurricular activities that benefit all students, rich or poor. A large number (maybe even majority) of Catholic private schools, for example, make less per student than public schools but they're often leaps and bounds better than most public schools.

When my public high school in a wealthy LA suburb faced steep budget cuts in the million of dollars during 2009-10, the booster club diverted more than half of the $5 million dollars that they had just raised from donors (families and alumni) for a new fake grass football and baseball field. This saved dozens of teachers, extracurriculars, and even some AP/IB programs. When the music program was cut district wide, dozens of stay at home and working parents got together and saved it by writing grants and running fundraisers (which they have to do every year now). Despite being low-middle class and having single parents who worked all the time, many of my classmates and I were able to participate in anything we wanted to because we could get second hand sports equipment and donations to cover expenses from team members' families. We always had a classmate who had a car or a parent with free time to drive us around, take us to college visits, and help us with science fair projects or model rocketry competitions. Even a few wealthy students can drastically change the support and infrastructure poorer students have access to and it makes a big differences (it certainly did for me).

Which is why we need to fight the concept of "school vouchers" - the idea that if you don't go to public school you should get your share of the public school cash to help pay for private school.

It seems like a great way to guarantee corruption in the public schools if they are still paid for services not rendered.

Why fight it? It seems only fair that poor people get the same option to choose good schools for their children that rich people get. I honestly don't see what possible argument there is against it.

There are plenty of good public schools. If everyone deserves a good school, then we need to make all schools good, not drain everyone away from one system and into another.

It wouldn't be draining money, since public schools would get money per-student just like private schools do (conversely, why does the local public school get to count private-school students in its catchment area?). And you're assuming that it's possible to make all public schools good, which from what I can tell is roughly impossible to do given American political realities.

The idea is that public schools should be made good, the government should not be reducing the use of public schools. A good public schooling system is incredibly important for a functioning democracy, because a functioning democracy relies on a well educated citizenry.

> A good public schooling system is incredibly important for a functioning democracy, because a functioning democracy relies on a well educated citizenry.

A good schooling system is necessary, but must it be public?

It's important that it be affordable to everyone, regardless of wealth. If it's private with public funding and a profit motive, that messes things up pretty hard - see what's been happening with college tuitions and unlimited lines of public credit.

> It's important that it be affordable to everyone, regardless of wealth.

That's the whole point of giving each child's parents that child's share of public-education funds.

> If it's private with public funding and a profit motive, that messes things up pretty hard - see what's been happening with college tuitions and unlimited lines of public credit.

Teachers' and administrators' salaries are private profits from public funding, too.

You are, of course, correct that private schools would see the voucher amount as a price floor.

I think that there are bigger issues with collegiate funding, which have to do that people borrow from their futures (backed by public funds) in order to pay for near-term benefits for themselves. I'd have lived much more frugally in college had I internalised that I'd be paying those funds back.

Vouchers could also be said to be a mechanism for letting lower class families receive the same private school education that the rich can already buy.

They won't cover it. For example California pays about 10k per student per year on public education. Private schools in California cost 20 to 30k per student per year.

Funnily enough this is already done in Sweden, since a long time ago. A social-democrat country, would you believe it! It is also the same for health care and elderly homes. It is going to be one of the biggest election questions next year because the social-democrat will try to go for a "profit cap" on private companies in these sectors, because they are founded with tax money.

P.S I actually think we are unique in the world with supplying private companies with tax-money for health and school.

And property taxes are hugely distorted by Prop 13 in California.

How come? The tax base rate resets at the time of the transaction, and California real estate market is very robust with both new construction and resales. Many California markets have not (or have barely) recovered to pre-2008 levels, if you look at San Bernardino, Modesto or Fresno counties, also anywhere east of Sacramento and parts of Central California where property value is derived from agricultural land value, which did not do well under drought.

The only people who are freeloading under Prop 13 are those who owned their property for 20+ years, and they are freeloading in a very special way where they have been paying those property taxes for 20+ years to build those neighborhoods into desirable areas.

Yes, residential real estate mostly keeps up, but commercial real estate almost never gets reset due to minority ownership schemes:

https://www.thenation.com/article/have-california-voters-fin...

The answer is not as clear-cut as the article makes it to be, as commercial real estate is divided into roughly three groups - residential, commercial proper (e.g. shopping centers, office buildings, entertainment parks, hospitals) and industrial.

The residential owners probably would have no problem with losing Prop 13 protections, as any increases can be passed on to the willing renters. They are likely to lobby for small things, such as delaying assessments by a few months in order to raise rents and process vacancies properly. (Current California law stipulates 30- and 60-day notices for rent increases, so the timing on property tax increases and rent increases needs to be synchronized in some manner).

Things get trickier with commercial and industrial tenants. The big guys know of their power to change the attractiveness and commercial viability of entire plazas and neighborhoods. Therefore if you come out to Costco or Whole Foods or Simon Malls or Wal-Mart and ask them to build out presence in a major way, they would not want to be victims of their own success. From their point of view the value of the area increased only due to a significant long-term investment from their wallet, and they should not be penalized for it.

If the municipality doesn't like it, they're welcome to either build out the facilities themselves or just attempt to raise property taxes on the gas station, laundromat and a liquor store that are the current active tenants of the blighted area.

>just attempt to raise property taxes on the gas station, laundromat and a liquor store that are the current active tenants of the blighted area.

Prop 13 prohibits this.

Yep, I was driving at that. Cities have very little leverage in dealing with commercial operators (I suppose the bigger the city is and the smaller the vendor is, the greater the leverage), therefore no city councilman spends their time fretting over potential revenue losses from commercial property taxes.

It's far easier and time-efficient for the city to chase sales tax revenue (by attracting large retailers), residential property tax revenues (by building denser housing) and revenue from various licensing and permitting activites.

I agree with your point there, particularly that cities will look for regressive sales tax rather than property tax.

But the effective elimination of property tax on commercial real estate vs. residential real estate also has the problem of hugely distorting the market. When I was looking for office space for my startup around ~2010, there was enough empty commercial space to for every resident to have 200 sq. ft.!

Meanwhile, residential housing stock is so low that the rental market is largely driven by personal acquaintances. I remember calling numbers for 30 ads, and only getting a response from one, because they were like "hey I know that guy!"

This is also a zoning issue. But commercial real estate acts like an investment, and if empty commercial real estate is profitable to hold on to because rents are low and taxes are low, it makes it impossible for a market to properly switch between the two, even when all that commercial real estate can be zoned as acceptable for residential use.

In any case, I see no reason why commercial real estate should be taxed less than residential real estate, unless it would be desirable to distort the market in that way. (And depending on other forces it definitely could be. I just know that Prop 13 is a really bad deal for my county's economy, and don't know why the State should have the power to override the county or city on this.)

i agree with you, and it should be pointed out that prop 13 essentially prevents the state from literally kicking out everyone who can't afford to pay taxes on a home that's now valued at 5-10x what they bought it for, i.e. pretty much everyone that was here before the year 2000.

Except that the exemption can be inherited by descendants indefinitely, creating an ever-increasing windfall for (what amounts to) a tax-privileged bloodline.

When Prop 13 reached the Supreme Court, one justice noted the feudal character:

"These disparities are aggravated by § 2 of Proposition 13, which exempts from reappraisal a property owner's home and up to $1 million of other real property when that property is transferred to a child of the owner. This exemption can be invoked repeatedly and indefinitely, allowing the Proposition 13 windfall to be passed from generation to generation. ...

"Such a law establishes a privilege of a medieval character: Two families with equal needs and equal resources are treated differently solely because of their different heritage."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html

Thanks, that was a good read. This sounds like the Prop 58 exemption https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_58,_Real_Esta...

I am too young to remember the pro- and con- arguments concerning this proposition, but it's a little surprise 75.7% of the voters approved.

Looking at a larger picture, cash-starved municipalities are not that exciting to live in, with their dilapidated roads, aging infrastructure, poor public service coverage as far as police, firefighting, libraries and parks, as well as underfunded (and probably underperforming) school districts.

So isn't the issue self-correcting long-term? Places with a larger proportion of Prop 58 exemptions eventually run themselves into the ground, while places with tons of new construction and healthy resale market tax themselves into a nice school district and well-paved roads?

> [0] Of course, "everyone" likely means "every property owner", as school taxes are usually property taxes.

everyone pays property taxes, but only property owners pay it directly. for everyone else it is hidden in the costs of goods and services that required real estate.

The winning bid for a house is from someone who can afford to pay $1000/mo, and there are no property taxes. The house sells at whatever mortgage $1000/mo buys.

Now, add $200/mo of property taxes. The winning bidder now pays whatever mortgage $800/mo buys, since there's nobody who wants to pay $1001/mo overall for it (otherwise they'd have won the other bid).

Taxes on the unimproved value of land are pretty much equivalent to seizing ground rents. That doesn't really make things more expensive.

Indeed, but if you send your kids to private school (or your social peer group does), then you have a counter incentive against supporting the public schools with your tax money and your political empowerment.

This happens with daycare (which is mostly private) and higher education (with private universities having a massive presence), and the society has yet to collapse.

The idea that it's perfectly fine to go to a a private institution years 0-6 and years 18-22+, but the 6-18 range is categorically and unequivocally better served by public institutions has not really been proven beyond reasonable doubt.

I don't think that I made any such claims. But to note a difference between those age groups, 6-18 is the only one for which we've declared a right to access for everybody at the present time. (At the very least, it's in the constitution of some states). The only way I can think of to ensure available capacity is to provide a public option. So I'm interested in how the public schools are managed.

I agree access is important, and it's interesting to see public school unions fight against charter, magnet and private schools in order to restrict that access.

With that said, notice how the distribution of private schools per capita drops significantly in highly-rated public school districts. There's simply no demand for them.

The private-vs-public battle only plays out in low-rated school districts, with one party holding the distinct advantage of being un-fireable.

I'm not sure how this is related to my comment. With that said, I suspect that religion dwarfs any other factor driving the demand for private schools.

In my state, the union definitely does not oppose private schools, and the magnet high school in my district is a union shop. The union opposes the state's growing voucher school program, but proponents of vouchers talk in "access" terms while promoting a barely concealed sectarian agenda. So once again, religion is a driving factor. Meanwhile, the union has been barred from collective bargaining on "working conditions" that include things like tenure. So, the ways that public school teachers can be fired, is at the mercy of the state legislature right now.

So far the voucher schools have under-performed public schools in the same districts, despite being given advantages such as more latitude in hiring and firing, and the ability to reject handicapped kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com