For years I have supported more resources for early education, even to the point of considering a change in our total system of funding public schools that would include an earlier year of mandatory, free attendance, even to the point of substituting a year of pre-kindergarten for the senior year of high school. We should become more serious about establishing earlier education for all our children.
Proponents of this idea have offered a number of initiatives but always run up against resistance to higher taxes. This year they try again on the November ballot with Amendment 3, which would amend the state constitution to increase cigarette taxes.
Trouble is, in their commendable zeal to raise money for early education, they raise too many troublesome side issues, incurring opposition from a wide range of education organizations, medical researchers, health care advocates and politicians. The proposal even incurs opposition from both anti-abortion and pro-abortion-rights interests.
In competing columns appearing in our edition last Sunday, longtime early education advocate Jack Jensen squared off against Ron Leone, the executive director of the Missouri Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association. Leone’s group generally opposes tax increases on motor fuel and tobacco, an obviously selfish position that is understandable given its narrow economic interests, but on this issue he successfully outlines the larger case against ratification of Amendment 3.
Major tobacco firms are the primary funding agencies behind the initiative. Not only does the amendment include catch-up taxation of competing, smaller off-brand cigarettes left out of earlier tobacco settlement provisions; it specifically forbids use of funds for “tobacco-related research of any kind.”
Amendment 3 allows tax money to go to private or religious schools, otherwise prohibited in the Constitution. It restricts use of money for stem cell research, treatment and cures. It incorporates an annual automatic tax increase for four years and has incurred the opposition of more than a hundred state legislators and both gubernatorial candidates.
As a general proposition, enacting a particular tax increase of this kind by amending the constitution is not a good idea. I can sympathize with proponents frustrated with the inaction of state legislators, but when they suggest enacting tax increases by way of constitutional amendment, they should at least make the language simple and entirely to the point. Amendment 3 has too many troublesome ancillary implications. A “clean” tobacco tax increase would have more public purchase. Missouri’s is the lowest cigarette tax in the nation, and our spending is in the bottom 25 percent. But given the substantial opposition that has arisen, I doubt Amendment 3 will pass.
I plan to vote “No” and continue to work for a better way to increase early education. Missouri is behind most states in funding. We should do better.