Thomas Friedman, in his 1/13/2009 New York Times column, titled: "Tax Cuts for Teachers," correctly identifies education as a major problem, but misses the mark on the solution.  Friedman does make a number of salient points.  He is absolutely correct that if we're going to stimulate, we should invest in people and projects that actually stimulate again and again (i.e. people who build productive businesses and/or solve important societal problems), not tax rebates or bridges, that are done stimulating once they are spent or built.  He is also correct that our international competitiveness is in serious jeopardy due to a dearth of students pursuing careers rooted in math and science.

The problem is his proposed remedy?  He would eliminate "federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose those careers."  Therein lies the rub—the not-so-invisible-hand of government in place of a more market-determined efficient solution. 

I happen to believe that the state of our educational system is the number one or two issue facing the country, along with the need to tamp down global extremeism.  It strikes me as misguided, though, to substitute government action for private sector innovation.  We would be better served if the government focused on catalyzing the free market to develop creative/effective reforms, rather than attempting to solve the problem itself.

Do we  really want the government picking winners?  Should we expect other constituent groups to sit idly by and not make the case for their value and relative under-appreciation?  How would we respond if nurses, research scientists, accountants, green technology workers, and others all proclaimed their worth and presumed right to pay no federal income taxes?  We must recognize and appreciate the precedential value associated with each government action.  Even though, when viewed in a vacuum, the proposed action may appear reasonable, it quickly becomes unreasonable when it is used as the basis for many future actions—the collective weight of which are unsupportable.

This is the proverbial slippery slope.  We all know that government would never be disciplined enough to not expand such an initiative to include other groups.  The pressure would be immense.  Soon the overwhelming preponderance of the tax burden would fall on an increasingly smaller percentage of the population.  Already, the top 1% account for 40% of federal income tax revenue.  The top 5% generates 60%.  What if the top 5% paid 80% or 90% of the tab?  There would be dramatically reduced incentive to innovate and produce.  Capital and talent would quickly be directed to locations outside the United States where industriousness and risk are more fairly rewarded.  Remember when the UK had a top tax rate of 98% (on investment income)?  It was a major contributor to Great Britain's precipitous economic and social decline.  The country only began to recover when it broke the cycle of entitlement spending and concomitantly lowered taxation rates to be more competitive with other industrialized nations.

There are many ways to chip away at the structural shortcomings of our tattered educational system.  We've seen many of them work in smaller-scale, incubator environments.  Let's remove the NEA- and other-imposed shackles, and unleash the full imaginative force of the marketplace to drive long over-due reforms.  Friedman's solution demonstrates that not all tax cuts are created equal.  The problems of our educational system are too broad to be fixed by such a narrowly defined approach.