Spokesmen for two national Jewish Orthodox groups pleaded today at a House Ways and Means committee hearing for a committee bill which would grant federal income tax credits to parents of children attending non-public schools. One was Rabbi Moshe Sherer, executive president of Agudath Israel of America. The other was Dennis Rapps, executive director of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA).
Speaking as president of Citizens Relief for Education by Income Tax, Rabbi Sherer urged the committee “to save the concept of freedom of educational choice for American parents which has become a myth because of the spiraling costs of non-public education which has virtually barred this type of education for millions of our citizens.” He said the CREDIT coalition represented parents of five million children attending non-public schools. Accompanied by a panel of leaders of non-public education systems of all faiths, Rabbi Sherer asked that the committee, of which Wilbur Mills (D. Ark.) is chairman, bring out such a bill in time for enactment during the current Congressional session.
Rabbi Sherer estimated that tax credit bills being considered by the House and Ways Committee, which would provide a range in tax credits from $200 annually to $500 per child, would provide parents of children attending yeshiva elementary and secondary schools in the United States with financial aid ranging between $10 million and $20 million annually. While most of the bills are exclusive nonpublic school aid measures, a proposal submitted by Rep. Mills and Rep. Hugh L. Carey links tax credits with a massive public school aid bill. Administration spokesmen, appearing before the committee yesterday, rejected that measure as too costly.
Rapps criticized the “basic unfairness” of the present laws which do not grant tax relief to non-public school parents who, he said, relieve the state of the burden and expense of educating their children while at the same time the parents contribute to the general tax fund from which public education funds are drawn.
NO CONSTITUTIONAL BARRIER SEEN
He told the committee that the “excessive entanglement” of government with religion held in recent US Supreme Court decisions to bar direct transfer of public funds to parochial schools “is simply not present in the tax credit concept.” Under that plan, he said, “the tax authorities merely have to ascertain the fact that tuition was paid by the parent.” That procedure, he declared, would require “no more government supervision than that currently undertaken in connection with charitable contributions.”
Rapps urged the committee members to “reject the notion that the ‘tax credit’ concept is a subterfuge to get around the recent Supreme Court rulings.” He said that, “on the contrary,” the Supreme Court “found specific constitutional problems with certain programs of direct aid to parochial schools. Even a superficial analysis,” he added, “indicates that these problems are simply not present in the ‘tax credit’ concept.”
Howard Rhine, COLPA president, said in New York that COLPA was ready “to defend the principle of ‘tax credit’ in the courts in properly drawn statutes should they come under legal attack.” He said the principle was “clearly in accordance with the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court in its recent rulings on aid to parochial schools and is an eminently reasonable approach to the problem of the government’s responsibility to provide a secular education to all its children, whether in public or parochial schools.”
After the hearings, Rabbi Sherer predicted that the House would pass a tax credits bill before the pre-election adjournment. He said he believed that the Senate would first consider the measure after the new Congress convenes in January because of lack of time for hearings before the election.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
