Post-Dispatch Balances Budget on Backs of Taxpayers

At least, one could think that from the beginning of this editorial:

THE GOVERNOR and the Missouri Legislature have made a lot of progress toward devising a new, fairer school funding formula. There's just one thing missing: the money to pay for it.

This is a lot like buying a big house without lining up the money to pay the mortgage. Or, as the Springfield News-Leader put it in an editorial on Friday, buying a fancy SUV with all the extras on the hope that your boss might give you an extra big raise next year.

In other words, this is tomfoolery.

Indeed, to proffer to spend money one doesn't have would be foolish. For someone outside the government. Fortunately, Jay Nixon, Missouri's Attorney General, knows where the Missouri state government will get the money:

"The way they have passed it," Mr. Nixon said, "they are funding it by cutting Medicaid for poor people. There'll be seven more years of cuts."

Excellent! It's zero sum, and the money comes from existing programs. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch should be happy, right? What more could it want besides funded education and no tax increases. Wait, they couldn't.....

The last time that the Legislature rewrote the school funding formula to make it fairer, it passed new taxes to pay for the improvements. The Outstanding Schools Act, championed by then-Gov. Mel Carnahan, included a $310 million income tax increase. This was the tax increase that Republicans railed against election after election as the "biggest tax increase in state history."

The St. Louis Post Dispatch wants more taxes. Perhaps that's why its subscriber base cannot afford to keep up subscriptions; they're too busy paying for all the the paper's pet programs instituted under a decade of Democrat rule.

And Jay Nixon, tired of being third fiddle in a JV hoe-down band, wants them, too, if they will help him get elected to the governorship after Matt Blunt is drafted to run for the presidency in 2008.