Tuition Tax Credits

Archive Report

Renewed Legislative Struggle

Timing for Vote Turns Unexpectedly Bad

With President Reagan's election last November, 1981 seemed to be the year Congress would pass a law enabling taxpayers to deduct some of the cost of sending their children to private schools. A tuition tax credit bill won House approval and picked up 41 votes in the Senate in 1978, and the 1980 elections, bringing a Republican majority to the Senate, improved the political climate for passage in the new Congress.

The Republican Party's 1980 platform championed tuition tax credits as “a matter of fairness, especially for low-income families, most of whom would be free for the first time to choose for their children those schools which best correspond to their own cultural and moral values.” And unlike ...

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