HAMILTONIAM WAYS
Dina Titus knows that if she gets a program like full-day kindergarten in place, it'll never go away
BY CHUCK MUTH

Chuck Muth is president and CEO of Citizen Out reach. He is a professional political consultant. Find more about him and read more of his work at www.chuckmuth.com. Other stories by Chuck Muth

For all her years in the Nevada Legislature, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dina Titus sure doesn't seem to understand basic budgetary economics. She does, however, understand basic Hamiltonian liberalism and isn't shy about misleading the public in pursuit of a new government program.

The issue at hand is the expansion of full-day kindergarten statewide. It's generally estimated that the cost to implement this new holy grail of liberalism will be in the neighborhood of $100 million for the next biennium. That's a pretty expensive neighborhood. Yet we all know that once adopted, the price tag will continue to climb year after year - the same way the cost of former Gov. Bob Miller's class-size reduction boondoggle has gone through the roof since its implementation.

So where would Dina Titus get the hundred mil? Well, according to an interview she gave in Reno News & Review last month, it would come from this year's expected $200 million budget surplus. But here's the huge fly in the ointment for that idea: Once you approve the statewide full-day kindergarten program, that cost will re-occur every year. On the other hand, the anticipated surplus is for this year only. There's no guarantee that there will be any surplus in the next biennium, let alone $100 million-plus.

And all for an untested, unproven, roll-of-the-dice program.

Feel free to recall that former Gov. Miller sold his class-size reduction program as a low-cost magic elixir to improve our government-run schools and student academic performance. Again, that was more than a decade ago. Is there anyone on the planet willing to argue that thanks to Bob Miller's class-size reduction program, which has skyrocketed in cost over the years, student performance has improved significantly? Or even modestly? Have taxpayers gotten any bang for the bucks spent on this program? 

Hardly.

Expect similar non-results from Titus' full-day kindergarten scheme. While Titus maintains that "all of the studies show" that full-day kindergarten improves student performance, that's just not true. As Molly Ball of the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote recently, "As with so many controversial issues, there are competing studies, with some arguing that all-day kindergarten is actually bad for kids because it pushes them beyond what they're ready for."

Any parent of a 5-year-old can attest to that. It's not so much the capacity for learning at that age; it's the attention span. 

Let's face it, full-day kindergarten is being pushed not for its unquestioned positive effect on student academic performance, but because the additional class time will require the hiring of additional dues-paying members of the teachers union, as well as provide taxpayer-funded afternoon day-care for working moms. Neither has anything to do with boosting student learning and academic performance.

But let's get back to the money. Since Titus is a government professor, perhaps now would be a good time for a little American history lesson to see exactly what she really has up her sleeve strategically on this issue.

Arguably, America's first big-government liberal was Alexander Hamilton, who as George Washington's Treasury Secretary aggressively worked to build up a strong, central government - much to the consternation of limited-government founders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. And in a newspaper article entitled "Address to the Public Creditors," Hamilton once explained that there were always obstacles and delays in implementing his government-expanding programs, "yet once adopted, they are likely to be stable and permanent. It will be far more difficult to undo than to do." 

Or as Ronald Reagan put it some 200 years later: "Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!"

Dina Titus is a true, big-government Hamiltonian liberal who knows that once she gets a program like full-day kindergarten in place, it'll never go away. The fact that the money to pay for it likely won't be there in the future is of no concern to her. But it should be to Nevada taxpayers, because at that point, Nevada politicians will either have to raise taxes again or cut some other programs. And as Hamilton and Reagan have noted, programs are rarely killed.

So, Dina's full-day kindergarten program means an inevitable tax hike. Period. 

Remember that when you go to the polls. LW