Sen. Warren released an education plan Monday that calls for raising federal funding for public schools to $450 billion over 10 years, roughly four times current levels, according to Bloomberg News. The proposal also calls for spending $200 billion on students with disabilities, $100 billion on educational grants and $50 billion on school infrastructure.
“The vastly unequal state of public school facilities is unacceptable and a threat to public education,” Warren said in a statement. “We cannot legitimately call our schools ‘public’ when some students have state-of-the-art classrooms and others do not even have consistent running water. The federal government must step in.”
Funding for the plan would come from Warren’s proposed wealth tax, which the Massachusetts Democrat says will raise $2.75 trillion over a decade – a claim that some tax experts have said is too optimistic. With this education plan, all the projected revenue from the wealth tax, which would impose a 2% levy on wealth above $50 million and a 3% levy on wealth over $1 billion, has now been assigned by Warren to specific policy proposals:
- $1.25 trillion on tuition-free college and debt cancelation,
- $700 billion for universal childcare,
- $800 billion for public K-12 education.
The Wall Street Journal’s Joshua Jamerson says that Warren has previously cited other uses for the revenues from the wealth tax, including $100 billion to address the opioids crisis and $20 billion for election security. “Now that it is exhausted,” Jamerson wrote Monday, Warren “will need to find new ways to raise revenue for other proposals—something she has done before, as when she proposed a net investment income tax on high-income households to extend the life of Social Security.”
