Not that vouchers reduce both demand and funding for overtly public programs (though they certainly do so,) but that they spend taxpayer money on non-essential goods and services. They are so great a degree of dreaded "wasteful government spending" that even a hardcore liberal like me cannot accept them. If someone can and will privately purchase more and/or better services than bare survival requires, well and good; they earned and deserve it--but I see no reason taxpayers should purchase extra and/or non-essential services for those who simply WANT but cannot afford them.

Spending the nations money on things essential to the nation (food, shelter, healthcare, even clothing) is a no brainer unless one considers those without the means to purchase them net liabilities best eliminated. However, it is one thing to handout gritty bland government cheese to people who would otherwise starve and quite another to cut them a check for caviar on the taxpayers nickel. Subsistence is so much a federal responsibility that the Constitutions Preamble states "promot[ing] the general welfare" among its goals, but the federal government has neither duty nor right to spend any taxpayers money providing another MORE than subsistence.

In short, public programs should be neither the norm nor the alternative to nothing at all, but the STANDARD, the minimum survival requirements social contract government obligates states to ensure citizens. What value or even validity exists in a social contract government that cannot even prevent its constituents starving to death in return for their tax dollars? Yet if such a minimal and thus unsatisfying standard is the norm, the nation has done something very wrong, because then everyone wants but few can obtain more.

A superior private provider of goods and services is therefore as vital as a minimal public one as not only the means of greater achievement by the people, and the nation by extension, but the incentive for that achievement. Tax funded vouchers to get more than the minimum privately is just an incredibly insufficient attempt to normalize living standards in the worst Soviet tradition. This is getting a bit surreal, but the welfare state is not and was never meant to be taxpayer funded grab bag, and even Marx never said, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their WANT."