In her first major policy address today, we're told that Governor Palin will call for "full funding" of special education. Special needs children are "not a problem, they're a priority," she told Jill Zuckman of The Chicago Tribune, and will presumably say today.
"Full funding" of special education has a specific meaning. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) sets a target of 40 percent for the federal share of funding for children with special needs, to ease the burden on states and local governments. The reality has been more like 17 percent. For years, there has been a struggle in Congress to get closer to the promised "full funding," with significant progress made in the late Clinton and early Bush year as the federal share crossed the 10 percent and then the 15 percent threshold, though it still fell far short of "full funding," which would cost an additional $25 billion a year.
Few are opposed on the merits to full funding of IDEA. The obstacle has always been the budget, and the fact that such domestic spending is crowded out by tax cuts, defense spending and then concern about the deficit. Special needs children may be a "priority," but they have fallen behind these others.
And in the McCain-Palin agenda, they still do. McCain has proposed a "spending freeze," with exceptions for entitlements, defense and veterans programs. That leaves the category known as domestic discretionary spending, which includes programs like IDEA. In the current budget, domestic discretionary spending totals $392 billion. So fully funding IDEA, while implementing a spending freeze on that category would require cutting every other domestic program by an average of 6.4 percent. That would include Pell Grants, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, WIC, clean-energy research, Section 8 housing -- dozens and dozens of programs. I hope someone today will ask Governor Palin whether she's proposing to cut all those programs, and why.
This is the apotheosis of what I once called (long before the former Miss Wasilla joined the ticket), "Miss America Conservatism," in which conservatives express disdain for all of government except for their single "platform" issue on which they lavish money and attention (as Palin says, "it's not all about money") to show their human side. Yes, governor, it is all about money, and when your priorities are tax cuts, war and freezing spending, special needs children are not going to be a priority.
--Mark Schmitt
