Cruise, Pluto and TASC
Inside Liberty Watch Today - August 28, 2006

By Doug French

With TASC getting closer and closer to the November ballot, the opposition engines have geared up. Oh it's probably just a coincidence that the study produced by out-of-towners (Denver) Augenblick, Palaich and Associates was made public last week. The study found that Nevada taxpayers must cough up another $1.3 billion per year to adequately fund K-12 education. K-12 already gets $1 billion a year and look at the results.

If only taxpayers controlled the school districts, we could ditch the overpaid, under performing; Prima Donna White Elephant like Paramount's Sumner Redstone jettisoned the dysfunctional overpaid nut-job actor Tom Cruise last week. Forget all the stuff about Redstone being uncomfortable with Cruise's erratic behavior and public musings about Scientology. Cruise costs too much and his product doesn't generate enough return, so, goodbye.

Of course it's the same with public schools, but the local worthies think it can be fixed with more taxpayer money. Maybe Redstone should try that, just pay Cruise more money. That will fix it: more people will come see his movies then.

Of course this is nonsense. Redstone knows better than to throw good money after bad. More money to Cruise would send the signal that the studio liked what he was producing and he would do more of the same, and eventually the studio would go out of business.

And the local businessmen who are hell bent to keep TASC off the ballot, would do exactly as Redstone has done with Cruise at their respective businesses. But when it comes to public education they have a blind spot. If we just had another billion plus a year, Nevada schools would be cranking out geniuses, and besides the taxpayers are a bottomless well.

It's easier to get rid of planet, than to slow down the growth of government. That's right, it turns out Pluto wasn't living up to its former billing. It just isn't planetesque enough anymore. The new definition of a planet is: "A celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." So now Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's. Dwarf? That's a little insensitive; surely, they could come up with a nicer moniker.

Of course conspiracy theorists might believe that modern school kids are having trouble memorizing all nine planets and so the thought was to make the exercise easier by culling the number down to eight.

Cooler heads would say that kind of talk is crazy, inflammatory and unproductive. Instead they say things like: "It would kill education. It doesn't work. How dare these sons-of-bitches come in from out of state to tell us how to run our system. Who the hell are they?" These community-minded types want to "help the voters understand how TASC-like initiatives have sunk other growing cities and states." After all, these enlightened ones, "understand how crippling TASC would be."
First of all, the folks behind TASC have lived here a long time. The consultants who pocketed $225,000 of taxpayer money to tell the Legislature they should sock it to the taxpayers to the tune of $1.3 billion a year are the out-of-state sons-of-bitches.

Second, no states or cities have sunk because of TASC-like initiatives. Colorado passed a TASC-like initiative years ago. That state's economy is doing fine. Two of the nation's best places to live are in Colorado, according to Money magazine. Colorado Springs ranked first in cities with a population of 300,000 or more and Fort Collins ranked first among cities from 50,000-299,999. Denver is the eighth most expensive city in the U.S., according to The Economist Intelligence Unit, and U-Haul reported that Denver was the ninth most popular destination city in 2005. The rumors of Colorado's demise would appear to be greatly exaggerated.

However, cities and states with run-away government are on the brink of disaster. San Diego, Houston and New Jersey quickly come to mind.

Hopefully, the stars and planets will align and the voters get their chance to vote and pass TASC.

Doug French Liberty Watch Columnist


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