The federal government should fund “ALL” education in America. There is no reason to not do this, and it would remove one of the most costly burdens from state and local governments that do not have the advantage of issuing their own currency. This removes all objections based on unfunded mandates and can be as simple as a number representing the average cost of educating one student times the number of students in a congressional district paid to the state.

The states would then be free to distribute that money as they see fit as long as it is spent on education that benefits students. States that see vouchers as the best methodology could do so, or use direct funding of education where voters prefer at the state level. This provides the ideal of funding the public purpose with the nation’s currency with local control that allows methodology to be decided based on outcomes. States that get it wrong would suffer the consequences and the voters would quickly punish their leadership.

While I agree that we should tax the wealthy far more, we should never do so to secure “funding” for anything. Doing so makes that funding dependent upon the government’s questionable ability to remove wealth from the sector of the economy that is best able to resist paying taxes, purchasing congresscritters outright if necessary. The only way to overcome their advantage in resisting taxes is to make them irrelevant to the funding of anything and applying taxes to their wealth just because they have too damn much money than is good for our nation.