Clinton Rips School Tuition Bill As Ill-Advised
Senate defeats Clinton's school construction plan
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, April 21) -- President Bill Clinton Tuesday criticized a Republican bill to provide tax breaks for private school tuition as an ill-advised measure that would not help the cause of education or American families.
At a Rose Garden session with reporters, Clinton instead lobbied Congress to pass administration proposals to fix dilapidated and aging schools, hire more teachers and reduce class size. His lobbying didn't work, though. Hours later, the Senate defeated the administration's school construction measure on a 56-42 vote.
The White House has promised to veto the tuition tax measure, and Clinton ripped into the bill as bad on several fronts.
"The proposal is bad education policy and bad tax policy," Clinton said. "It won't do anything to strengthen our schools and, in fact, would weaken public education by siphoning limited federal resources away from public schools."
 Transcript: President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Sen. Tom Daschle, Rep. Dick Gephardt |
Despite its $1.6 billion cost, Clinton argued the measure would do little for most families, providing only an average $7 annual tax break for parents with children in public school and $37 for parents with children in private school.
Clinton also said the measure would disproportionately benefit the highest-income families. "Families who are struggling to make ends meet would never a penny of it," Clinton declared.
"If we want our children to be prepared for the 21st century, they ought to have 21st century schools," Clinton said. "The right way to fix the schools is to fix them, not walk away from them."
The tuition tax break bill would allow the creation of savings accounts for children to meet costs of attending grade school or high school. Accumulated interest and withdrawals would be tax-free, although the contributions of up to $2,000 a year would be taxed.
The school construction measure that failed would have earmarked $11 billion for interest rate subsidies for school construction over 10 years. The plan called for issuing bonds to build or repair 5,000 schools. It was introduced by Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun.
The day's debate gave Democrats and Republican lawmakers a chance to offer competing election-year education agendas.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said the tuition tax bill puts choices about
schooling in the hands of parents, teachers and local districts.
"We're allowing the parents who have the most to win or lose
the opportunity to take their own money that they worked for and
put it in their savings accounts," Hagel said.
Democrats, however, wanted to boost federal support of school
construction through interest subsidies for school bonds and the
hiring of teachers in poor areas by forgiving their student loans.
In one early vote, the Senate rejected on a 56-41 vote an attempt by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to kill the savings accounts and use the money to recruit teachers instead.
"We have to decide if we are going to use that money [$1.6 billion in GOP bill] to create an IRA [Individual Retirement Account] that will be primarily used to support private schools or whether we will take that billion six hundred million dollars and
use it to create more teachers across this country," Kennedy said.
Kennedy's move was denounced, though, by Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.), one of the measure's proponents.
"The effect of the senator from Massachusetts' amendment is
to gut and make mute the entire exercise we've been at here now for six months," Coverdell charged. "He would, in effect, deny 14 million families, 20 million children, the benefit of
education savings accounts, the majority of which are public, not private."
Coverdell said Clinton was unaware of the bill's potential benefits and predicted it will pass.
"This proposal is going to pass, and the president is going to be confronted with a decision that helps millions of Americans," Coverdell told CNN's Frank Sesno. "Is he going to sign it and make it law? Is he going to be an obstructionist?"
Clinton, Vice President Gore, House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle spoke to reporters after a private meeting to plot strategy for the remainder of the current session of Congress.
The Clinton Administration's proposed FY 1999 budget includes nearly a dozen new education programs, including $12.4 billion to hire 100,000 new teachers over the next seven years; a $22 billion bond initiative to help re-build older school buildings; and $1 billion for after-school programs.
For the second day in a row, Clinton also urged passage of national tobacco legislation that would boost cigarette prices in an attempt to discourage teen smoking.
CNN's Jonathan Karl and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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