this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Yes, but they see it as their tax money being returned to them. The argument for vouchers is that without them, they're paying for schools they don't use.
Are you operating under the absolutely bizarre assumption that the only Republicans who are in favor of school vouchers have school-aged children? Or children at all?
I'm using "they" more broadly here to include people who share that moral foundation. School vouchers slot into the same worldview as being anti-welfare and pro-private-healthcare, for example, which could be summed up as "I got mine, get your own". I don't subscribe to that personally, but it doesn't help matters to completely misrepresent that position.
I do not see how a childless Republican got theirs with school vouchers. The only people school vouchers benefit are people with school-age kids that want to send them to private religious school.
The reason they're in favor of school vouchers is that they hate public school and they want to religiously indoctrinate children.
You're being too literal. This is an ideology. They see having money as a proxy for responsibility and success, and redistribution of it as rewarding the unworthy. All practical manifestations of this, whether it's schools or healthcare or whatever, stem from that ideology.
Except that "the unworthy" are doctors and lawyers. Including Republican doctors and lawyers. Who will be paying back student loans their whole life. So maybe there's more to it than that.
No, because if they are worthy and pull hard enough on their bootstraps, they too with reach the apotheosis of wealth. Think of it as a trial, or perhaps a filter. If they don't make it, they need to try harder. I'd maybe compare it to Darwinism, or even to military esprit de corps.
You do know those doctors and lawyers paying back their student loans can be Republicans, right? Do you think they believe they've failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps enough?
I'm in Indiana. I'm surrounded by Republicans. My wife has Republican relatives who are in these situations and in successful careers. This is not how they think. School vouchers are about their idea that public schools are atheist liberal institutions which will teach children to be transgender and worship Satan.
I'm basing my POV less on anecdata and moreso on reading (Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, uh, comes to mind). With that said, I can certainly imagine that things have pulled in the direction you describe since Trump, so perhaps those sources don't reflect the current reality quite as much.
Which is a dumb and bad argument because better public schools make for the people you run into around town being smarter. Everybody wins.