What happens if Governor John Lynch succeeds in getting his constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2008? Lynch gets the credit for “finally” “solving” the “education funding crisis.” And his coattails once again sweep the Democrats to large majorities in the House and Senate. Indeed, they may even sweep U.S. Senator Sununu back into the private sector.
What happens if Lynch doesn’t get his amendment on the 2008 ballot? Then things get interesting.
By then, we should know how much an “adequate education” costs, because more than a year will have passed since the Lynch definition was passed, which is plenty of time for some consulting firm to say what the definition costs. The methodologies that these consulting firms use to determine the cost of an adequate education are thoroughly capricious, which means one can make a case that the cost is practically anything one wants the cost to be. The likelihood is that, at a minimum, the cost will be at least $1.6 billion because that appears to be the minimum that the Democrats will accept.
If Lynch’s amendment isn’t on the 2008 ballot, then candidate for reelection Lynch is going to have to explain how the entire $1.6 billion (or more) will be funded with state taxes. My guess is that he won’t run for reelection, if his amendment doesn’t make it out of the Legislature, because he would find himself forced to choose between supporting an income or sales tax and repudiating his own “definition” of an “adequate education.”
Why then are House Republicans so conflicted about opposing the Lynch amendment?
It’s not like the Lynch amendment is a good amendment. To the contrary, it codifies all of Claremont’s ukases except for the ukase that state taxes fund every dollar of the mythical cost of an adequate education. Instead, state taxes have to fund “only” 50 percent of the cost.
Some Republicans claim that the Lynch amendment is the “best” we can get, and the alternative is an income tax. That’s a loser’s mentality. For Republicans to support the Lynch amendment is not statesmanlike compromise, it is abject surrender.
