Democrat demagogues say the darnedest things.
Take Assembly Ways & Means Committee Chairman “Moose” Arberry (please). Arberry told the Reno Gazette-Journal yesterday that “K-12 (education) does not have any money,” asking “How do you cut what has already been cut?”
Apparently there were no Republicans around to counter this whopper. Fortunately, your favorite non-Republican blogger is here to do the job for them.
First, the governor’s proposed K-12 education budget for the 2007-09 biennium is over $2 BILLION. Only by using government-school math could you equate $2 billion to “does not have any money.” I don’t know about Arberry’s neighborhood, but $2 billion is a lot of dough in our neck of the woods.
As for “cuts,” there simply aren’t any. The K-12 budget for the last biennium was over $1.9 billion. The governor’s proposed budget for K-12 for the coming biennium is over $2.2 billion. In every corner of the free world other than government schools, that’s a spending INCREASE…and a rather hefty one at that.
But not to Assembly Education Committee chairwoman Debbie Smith, who told the RGJ that she wants even MORE funding for education, saying the Legislature is “going to have to cut elsewhere if we are to better fund education.”
And folks, with that statement Asm. Smith has affirmed the power of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. A number of legislators like Smith are apparently coming to grips with the reality of Gov. Gibbons’ pledge to veto any and all tax hikes. So they’re finally doing what they should have been doing all along: Setting spending priorities and cutting less-important, duplicative and wasteful programs.
If we can just get everyone on the same page here, we can get the Legislature to pass a budget with no tax hikes and send them home early with no need for a special session(s). What are the odds?
Posted on May 3rd, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
Leave a Reply