This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The scholarship tax credit is among the easiest ways to extend school choice to parents.

How do they work? What are the costs and benefits to the education establishment?

Mark LeBlond is a policy analyst with the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania.

He describes how scholarship tax credits have function there.

We spoke in October in Colorado Springs.

Many states have scholarship tax credits for young people to attend school, particularly those with lower to middle incomes.

What is, how is Pennsylvania's program designed.

Thanks, Caleb.

So Pennsylvania's program is designed.

We have two of them, two programs, and we call them,

the naming is unfortunate. The main program is EITC which everybody in the world

thinks earned income tax credit. It's the educational improvement tax

credit program. So those are your low and middle income students that are eligible.

And then the second program is OSTC, opportunity scholarship tax credit program.

These are your low performing schools.

How it works is the business donates the money for the tuition.

So any business. And any business and now actually individuals can get involved too

but we can we can dive into that if you want to.

Then the business gets a tax credit.

It's either 90% or 75% of their donation

depending on their level of commitment.

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