Last week, president Felipe Calderón issued a presidential decree where a family can deduct from their taxes the cost of tuition in private schools, from the pre-school up until the pre-college preparatory school level.
For those who can afford to send their children to private schools, it's clearly a gain, and this will be popular with many sectors of the middle class. Yet it will also cost around 1.1-1.3 billion pesos in lost tax revenue, and as such is clearly a subsidy for the the rich on the expense of the poor - as simple as that.
Marcel Ebrard soon responded that rather than this tax break, the government should create a national program of scholarships for students of low means in secondary and pre-college levels - essentially implementing on a national programs the highly popular programs of Mexico City. If the goal is to reduce income differences and give the poor a push to get out of poverty - rather than, say, winning the middle class for the 2012 election (PRD Senator Carlos Navarrete denounced it as electioneering, and rightly so) - Ebrard's proposal makes much more sense.
Now, UNAM rector José Narro Robles also came out against the decree, pointing out how much these 1.3 billion pesos could have helped out in terms of improving public access to education on the university level for Mexico's poor.
According to the Instituto Mexicano de Ejecutivos de Finanzas (IMEF), those likely to benefit are families with incomes around 50,000-100,000 pesos per month - hardly those with the most pressing needs in Mexico.
Yet given the outrageous comments from Ernesto Cordero yesterday, where he argued that one could well live on 6,000 pesos and still afford a house and a car in Mexico, one might seriously question how connected to reality some PAN policy makers really are.
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