State Senator Rollie Heath is a fan of using children as props to pass his $3 Billion tax hike known as Prop 103. He kidnapped a group of 4th grade children from Douglas County for his kick off press conference, earning him the wrath of parents who were none-too-pleased about their children being used without their permission. Now he's back to using kids as props again, begging donors for money "for the kids."
The Yes on 103 campaign just blasted out an email from Rollie asking for 100 more donors for their (lost) cause. The email implies that those who don't support a job-killing tax increase in the midst of the Great Recession are somehow abandoning children. It begins:
Dear [Redacted],
How can we walk away from the opportunity for our kids to have a viable economic future by denying them the one thing that makes a difference: a quality education?
Yes, because times are tight, and people can't afford to fork over more to the government, they are "walking away" from children. And people who don't donate to Rollie's political slush fund are child abusers. Or something like that.
You know what would really help kids realize a viable economic future? Parents with jobs who can pay the bills. As now two studies have shown, Prop 103 is a job killer. Supporters of Prop 103 don't have a shred of economic evidence to prove otherwise.
But they do have their rhetoric.
"It's for the kids" rhetoric has become a tired tool for the Left in Colorado, who have beaten voters upside the head with it more times than we can count.
What Rollie Heath should really be saying is it's for the state government to redistribute. Voters know how that works out (see: Ref C). For the kids becomes for the teacher's retirement accounts, and for more green energy programs at universities, and a number of other ways liberal legislators can fund their pet programs in the name of education funding.
Voters are also becoming aware that more money for schools equals a higher quality education is a deceitful trope pushed by the teacher’s unions, who have most to gain from more money in their coffers. If that were true, Newark, NJ would have the nation's best schools, as it's per pupil spending is over $22,000 — nearly twice the national average. Despite this, Newark still has one of the lowest graduation rates.
The truth is voters are okay with giving more money to schools, but only if they know it will improve things. People are more apt to approve local tax increases for local schools, as taxpayers in Thornton don't have any idea whether their money is supporting a good or bad system in Pueblo. Most Coloradans, except for a few neighborhoods in Boulder as Governor Hickenlooper would say, are not keen on taxes being raised to only see them thrown in a big statewide pot, where often their local school district gets less of the funding than the district's taxpayers coughed up in taxes.
More to the point, education funding has gone up. And up. And up. And test scores have stayed flat, flat, flat. Liberals and unions were only going to succeed so long in getting voters to continue pumping quarters into the machine without having to show some success.
As Victor Mitchell of SaveColoradoJobs.org has said, the problem with education in Colorado is structural. Until we fix that we will be truly abandoning our kids. As endless studies have shown, it's good teachers that count, not more teachers.
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Photo Credit: Colorado News Agency