Remember that Staples ad where the parent runs down the aisle tossing school supplies into the cart while “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” plays in the background. That’s how I feel about this time of year.
As the parent of three children, I love back to school. I crave the sense of normalcy and order that it brings to my house. Summer to me, is chaos. Just hot, sticky chaos. But back to school? There’s a schedule. Every day, there is a sense of purpose. My oldest daughter scrambles out of bed in the morning with a plan: get dressed, pick up the backpack and head out to school. And this year, my youngest daughter who very matter of factly accused me of keeping her out of school on purpose is starting preschool a few days per week. There are school events: picture day, picnics and dinners. It is a thrilling season.
Until the tuition bill comes.
As I might have mentioned once or twice before, I live in Philadelphia (get used to more references – football season is starting, the Eagles are playing and I have Donovan McNabb in my fantasy football league). For reasons that are more complicated than a blog post or two can cover, I choose to send my children to private school rather than public school. This is not an easy thing for us to do financially, and it will become more difficult as my children get older. It is, as I’ve posted about before, part of the difficulty of being middle class in America.
And each time I try to sort out whether this is the right thing to do, I realize that, as a nation, I still can’t figure out our priorities. The feds don’t give you any kind of break for private school tuition: if you pay for private or parochial school, no deduction. Yet, since I can keep my child out of school in the state of Pennsylvania until the age of 8 (!), if I paid for private childcare at home instead of school, that would be deductible. Oh yeah, you read that right: it’s better from a tax perspective to keep my child home for years and pay for childcare than to send her to private school. Is that smart tax policy?
And if I buy a more expensive home in a different school district, the interest from the mortgage interest is deductible. And how much “extra” home could I buy? The interest equivalent of tuition for my three children is about $450,000. Put another way, inflating the amount that I am willing to spend on my home by $450,000 results in additional annual mortgage interest equal to the cost of tuition for my children – and it’s deductible. How deductible? I can deduct the interest of a home worth up to a million dollars – a million. So instead of investing in education, I should invest in real estate according to current tax policy. Kind of makes you understand how we got into this sub-prime fiasco, huh?
Don’t get me wrong. I love my daughter’s school (I’d better, I signed up to be class parent this year). I value education. I make sacrifices so that my children can go to a good school (you will not be seeing me in these Jimmy Choo shoes anytime soon). But I just have to wonder about the direction our country is headed when we’re willing to subsidize houses, cars and even washing machines through tax incentives – but not education.
Well, the feds do offer some tax incentives for college. I guess that’s something.
{ 3 comments }
