Burbank: Think of the Children

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, thinks of the children and says, "Taken together, these four initiatives will cost our state -- and our children -- half a billion dollars in public investments every two years, undermining our children's prospects for education and economic opportunity. That isn't patriotic. It is just plain wrong."

Burbank lies throughout his piece -- for example, saying that privatizing liquor sales will result in more teenage deaths (which isn't warranted by the facts), and repealing the new candy-and-soda tax will result in more obesity and diabetes (which is literally impossible, unless people would ingest more candy and soda after the tax is repealed than before it was in place) -- but his biggest lie is the one the Democrats tell us all the time: that a reduction in general funds means a reduction in funding for education.

They constantly remind us that it is the constitutional "paramount duty" of our state to provide for education for children; what they don't like to note is that this necessarily means that spending money on anything other than education, while education is not being fully funded, is unconstitutional. And that means that if education is underfunded, the Democrats who run the legislature, and the Democratic Governor, are violating the Constitution.

The fact is, they want to cut education, because that's the best way to get people to want to raise taxes. But when they cut education below what they believe is constitutionally required, they are violating the very Constitution they pretend they need to raise taxes to uphold.

I defy Burbank to think honestly about what the Founders would have said is patriotic. He will find that taxing candy, controlling all liquor sales, and deceptively using "the children" to justify all manner of tax increases was not what they had in mind.

The Patriots were contrasted in the Revolution to the Loyalists. The Loyalists supported the central British government, including its high taxes, and backed -- and participated in -- British propaganda. They thought resistance to British rules was morally wrong. They feared the crowds who were angry at the government. They were pessimistic, disbelieving that people could govern themselves.

Burbank, like many of today's progressives, doesn't sound like a Patriot to me. He sounds like a Loyalist.