Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, February 8, 2025 "You and Your Children Are Being Robbed"

A Liberal Dose

Troy D. Smith

February 7, 2025

“You and Your Children Are Being Robbed”

As you probably know, last week the Tennessee General Assembly passed Governor Bill Lee’s school voucher plan. This passed -via a majority of the Republicans in the legislature -despite the fact public school teachers, every school board in our area, and a majority of people in our county were opposed to it, because it would only benefit people with money and ultimately hurt rural counties like ours. I heard that one such legislator told voters who called him that he had to do what was good for the state, not the people in the county that elected him. But was this even for the good of the state? It will expend hundreds of millions of YOUR TAX DOLLARS to give $7,000 scholarships to parents who want to send their kids to private schools. 20,000 such scholarships the first year, and a growing number each year after that. Half of them are to go to “low-income” families -and their definition of low-income is less than $170,000 per year. In what universe is $169,000 dollars a year “low income”? The other half can go to anybody. As I outlined last week, the average private school tuition in Tennessee is $12,000 per year. TRULY low-income families will be out of luck, as they will still have to scrape up thousands of dollars which they don’t have. The only people who will be benefiting by this “choice” will be those who already can afford to send their kids to private schools. They’re going to get to pocket a big wad of YOUR MONEY. And bear in mind, almost half the counties in this state -the rural ones -do not have one single private school.

Know who else is going to benefit? Lobbyists, special interests, and big-donor fat cat pals of the governor. Scamming your kids is a lucrative business. Now, some Republican legislators listened to their constituents -and their conscience -and voted against this bill, including White County’s own Paul Sherrell, and bravo to them (Paul Bailey voted yes). Of course, it is true that some of them were supporting the bill right up to the point the vote was taken, and when they saw it had enough votes to pass changed their vote to “no” to avoid the anger of their voters back home, but some were sincerely motivated. In addition, they would not even allow an amendment to make sure special needs children were protected in this plan. Conservative Republican Todd Warner, from district 92 (out past Rutherford County), had this to say:

“This legislation is NOT conservative, fiscally responsible, or in the best interest of Tennessee families. It’s a blatant abuse of taxpayer funds, a betrayal of our principles, and a handout to special interests at the expense of our communities… This is not conservatism—it’s corruption. Conservatism is supposed to be about limited government, fiscal responsibility, and local control. This bill is the opposite of all three. It creates a massive new government program with no guardrails, no accountability, and no limits on costs, bloating the state budget and burdening taxpayers for generations… this isn’t school choice, it’s a scam masquerading as reform.”

Folks, everything this party does is to scam you and make their robber baron pals even richer at your expense. Trump disrupted the lives of working people all around the country with his spending freeze last week (which was stopped by judges). He has handed control over dispersing funds to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world (and not elected or congressionally approved to any actual office), and he is now going to be in charge of your social security and Medicare. Trump tariff wars -on our closest allies! -are about to send prices through the ROOF, and he has already stated that once prices go up he can’t get them back down.

Look. The Republican Party has always been the rich man’s party, and the Democrats have always been the party of the working class. Many of us forgot how to SAY that, and show it to you, but that is changing rapidly. The chaos we are seeing now, local, state and national, is what happens when you give all the power to one party. They do whatever they want. If our legislature, and every rural county around, were not super-majority Republican, there would be alternatives when decisions like this one about education come around. Stop just pulling that lever because it has an R next to it. When the next election rolls around, REMEMBER how you felt this week, and do something about it at the ballot box.

They try to keep you all worked up about who’s going woke so you don’t notice who’s going broke -you.

Kentucky had a state-wide referendum on this voucher issue on November 5, and the people voted it down. It would never have passed in Tennessee if the voters had been given a direct say. In two years, let’s vote the whole bunch out and replace them with someone who listens to their constituents and not the fat cats.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE