This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 5th, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown. A court case in Florida seeks to throw out scholarship tax credits for education and the state

Supreme Court might go for it. Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Educational Freedom, explains why tax credits for education are

clearly constitutional.

Back in 2006 there was a Supreme Court case, a Florida state Supreme Court case on that state's

case on that state's voucher program which was called the OSP

program and the Supreme Court struck it down

based on the state's uniformity clause. And here's what the uniformity clause says.

And I quote, adequate provision must be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools

that allow students to obtain a high quality education.

These terms like high quality being used in a state constitution just seems kind of weird.

Yeah, in fact the first time I read it, I thought I know that joke. That's a Stephen Wright joke. He says I got a dog and I called him stay. So when I wanted to come I say

come here stay after a while he went insane. I mean they're asking the

legislature to do two mutually contradictory things they're asking the

legislature to create a centrally planned one size

fits all government monopoly with no price signals to guide spending decisions and

then to make this monopoly efficient and high quality.

So what has this resulted? this Okay, well, what happened in the Bush v Holmes case, that voucher case from 2006, is that the Supreme Court said not only must the legislature create a uniform system of public schools along these lines.

But that is the only kind of publicly funded school system it can create.

So it threw out the voucher program. It said the voucher program was unconstitutional

under the under state constitution. So now there has been a lawsuit filed against

Florida's education tax credit program.

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