Sometimes the easy conservative Republican orthodoxy that government expansion is bad defies logic. It can seem ... well, let's not say mean. Let's go with wrongheaded.
You can't see into hearts. But you can hear the words that come out of mouths. And you can assess for yourself the caliber of thinking that apparently provides the foundation for the speaking.
On Saturday, Arkansas Republicans meeting in convention in Rogers struck a section of their platform. It was the one calling for universal access to state pre-K programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, as well as public funding for those in need of it.
Delegate Vickey Boozman of Cave Springs warned that, its specific language aside, the plank suggested a receptiveness to mandatory pre-K programs. She reminded that kindergarten started out as an option and then became mandatory. A voice vote supported her position.
Here's the conservative thinking one can assume to be the foundation for such talk: Government should help where needed, not presume to mandate. This emerging affinity for open-ended and publicly funded expansion of pre-K programs represents a governmental encroachment on parenthood. And it will be costly to the taxpayers. So we should not say something in our platform that might be construed as embracing a mandate.
Let's be clear: That state GOP position does not represent opposition to existing pre-K programs or existing funding assistance for those in need who choose them. It represents an aversion to expanding their access with additional public money because of worry about what that might portend.
Here, then, is the first and basic flaw in that thinking: Kindergarten is not mandatory. Heck, first grade to 12th grade is not mandatory. In Arkansas we permit parents to keep their kids at home, presumably to educate them there.
On the other hand, universal access to pre-K with funding assistance would mean that no poor family wanting to enroll its little one in a public early childhood program would be turned away on account of money.
The second flaw is that resisting the publicly funded expansion of pre-K for poor children is not pure or uncontroverted as a conservative view. There seems to be conflict between social conservatives who want government to limit its pre-K expansion and economic conservatives touting a cost-benefit analysis.
Even Oklahoma, our neighbor and usual rightest-wing role model, offers universal access to pre-K, and poor kids are doing better in the regular grades.
Economists working for the Federal Reserve have been issuing research findings for years showing that the best public investment we can make is pre-K programs.
In Minneapolis, a former Federal Reserve research economist named Art Rolnick has become a national advocate of pre-K programs.
He has contended that every public dollar spent on pre-K to enhance the opportunity of an economically disadvantaged child in its formative developmental stage eventually returns $16. Other studies put the return at $7. It varies on the quality of the pre-K programs themselves, of course, as well as whether we're talking about the rate of return on spending for the low-income or for all kids.
Rolnick explains that a poor child served by pre-K becomes more likely to do better in school, achieve economically and contribute to public coffers. He cites savings in the otherwise inevitable public cost of arresting and incarcerating that child later. He cites further savings in remedial services or job-training or public assistance programs.
Places that use public dollars for sports stadiums while their public schools decline are like Third World countries, he says.
Rolnick recently opposed Minnesota's proposal to fund pre-K programs for everybody. He argues that full public funding for everyone provides unneeded subsidies to middle-class and wealthy families. He says it reduces the return on investment, a calculation based on poor kids and the drain they pose later unless helped early.
And he says pre-K is too important to be put in the regular state budget where it would be susceptible to reductions from economic downturns and tax cuts. He says it ought to be underwritten by an entirely independent endowment that provides need-based scholarships.
Arkansas, trailing the national trend, has a law calling for pre-K programs with financial assistance for children in families within 200 percent of the federal poverty definition. But we've never fully funded it, through three governorships both Republican and Democratic.
Its amended platform leaves the state Republican Party vulnerable to the kind of criticism the state Democratic Party rushed to levy Sunday. It was that Republicans want no money for early childhood development for poor kids, but big money for redecorating the Governor's Mansion.
That's not exactly right. It's probably close enough for political work, though.
To be precise: Republicans do not want to commit to public funding for additional access to pre-K for poor children even as the state already has bought a thousand-dollar commode at the Governor's Mansion.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/09/2016