Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled an $800 billion plan to fund her progressive proposal for reshaping U.S. public education and disclosed that her signature wealth tax will pay for school and child-care initiatives -- in effect transferring the cost of raising a child from birth to college to America’s richest families.
Warren would quadruple U.S. federal funding for public schools over 10 years, to $450 billion, and add $200 billion for students with disabilities. The spending includes $100 billion in “Excellence Grants” over a decade -- the equivalent of $1 million for every U.S. school -- and $50 billion to improve buildings and other infrastructure.
“The vastly unequal state of public school facilities is unacceptable and a threat to public education,” Warren wrote in a Medium post Monday. “We cannot legitimately call our schools ‘public’ when some students have state-of-the-art classrooms and others do not even have consistent running water. The federal government must step in.”
Warren has been a long-time supporter of teachers, and on the campaign trail, she regularly recounts her job as a special-education teacher early in her career. She’s also been vocal in her criticism of Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s education secretary -- a billionaire and advocate of charter schools and taxpayer-funded school vouchers. Warren is expected to join striking teachers in Chicago on Tuesday.
Wealth Tax
To pay for her plan, the Warren campaign said the allocation from her proposed wealth tax will shift. The campaign estimates the tax will raise about $2.75 trillion over a decade. From that, Warren would cover her $1.07 trillion universal child-care plan, the cancellation of $640 billion of student debt, $610 billion for free-college tuition and now $800 billion for K-12 education.
The total cost of all of Warren’s proposals comes to $3.12 trillion, which is about $370 billion more than what the wealth tax would raise.
But the Warren campaign points to an analysis from Moody’s Analytics that estimates the program cost for her universal child-care plan would drop from $1.07 trillion to $707 billion when priced according to “dynamic scoring.” That’s an alternative way of calculating costs that takes into account the hypothetical economic growth benefits generated by the program over time. Democrats have long excoriated Republicans for using dynamic scoring, including in calculations of the costs of the 2001 tax cuts under President George W. Bush and other policies.
If her plan for a 2% tax on fortunes above $50 million is enacted, the 75,000 richest U.S. families would be paying the costs of raising and schooling every American child.
“Is it more important to leave two cents with the top one-tenth of 1% in this country or to ask them to pitch in their fair share so that we can make an investment in an entire generation of young people?” Warren told students at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday. “That’s why I’m running for president. I believe in you.”