Apr 13 2008
Nielsen Has Different Ideas
On education, a central theme for Democrats every election year, Nielsen departs from the usual party positions.
He wants parents to be able to use public money to educate their children in private schools. Most people call this a voucher system, but he prefers to call it parent choice.
Schools are failing children, Nielsen said, because they are geared toward sending students to college and ignore technical education that could lead to high-paying jobs.
“I believe the school system is broke,” he said at a candidate forum in Durham. “We have a generation of children we have lost and we may not ever recover them.”
I have always been of the belief that if you want to take your child out of the public school system you should be exempt from paying taxes to the school, whether you want to send them to a private school or home school them. Of course, I think the only people that should be paying for the public schools are the ones that have kids in them in the first place. This idea that the entire citizenry has to fork over their money for a failed product that a lot of them don’t use is inherently anti-capitalist.
He wants to eliminate property taxes for people over 65 with incomes less than $40,000 a year. He proposes an end to forced annexation by cities and towns.
This I do not agree with. I am all for lower taxation at any level, but I am not supportive of these select exemptions. If every senior citizen were to be exempt from paying property taxes that will drastically raise the taxes of everyone else in the community. It will be the working parents and their children that will have to shoulder the burden. That doesn’t cut it. Senior citizens are the wealthiest age group in this country. They don’t need to be pushing their share of the tax burden on the rest of us. If they are struggling then their family can pitch in. That’s what my family does with my 90 year old grandmother.
These two issues are just what the Observer covered, but Nielsen has a whole Web site of changes he envisions for the state. He has a lot of good ideas, but I don’t honestly understand why he is bothering to even run. He isn’t running to win. You can’t win a gubernatorial race just on word of mouth without raising money. That method might work if we had a voting populace that actually researched the candidates before they went to vote, but that simply doesn’t happen. People make their decisions based on name recognition and 30 second TV ads.
