From news service report
    
DENVER – While Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” song has a very different meaning, the mainstays of Colorado’s education establishment must have adopted it as their theme song. They must play it at their cocktail parties and networking luncheons.
    
The song’s regular refrain of “more, more, more” is what they want from taxpayers to fund government schools.
   
Mike Rosen writes in the Denver Post that a bill has been introduced that would increase the state’s school spending from $3.4 billion to a handsome $4.5 billion – all paid for with tax increases, at a time when taxpayers are struggling to keep up.
    
Via the Denver Post:

Amid a sluggish economy, high unemployment and taxpayers struggling to make ends meet, Democrats who now control the state legislature are compounding the problem with what they do best: a huge tax increase.

Their proposed education finance bill would add another $1.1 billion a year to the $3.4 billion we currently spend on K-12, now 40 percent of the state’s entire $7.6 billion operating budget. The schools also get another $1.9 billion from local property and vehicle registration taxes.

Add it up: $3.4 billion plus $1.9 billion plus $1.1 billion equals $6.4 billion. That ain’t hay.

The bill would steer a greater share of state funding to lower-income school districts. Since the districts losing those funds would have to raise their property taxes to stay even, the bill would bribe them to do just that with the offer of state matching-funds. Sounds contrived? It is.

In any case, taxpayers pick up the tab. Other goodies to buy votes with money we don’t have include more “transparency” and expanded kindergarten and preschool.

Collaborating with Sen. Mike Johnston, D-Denver, in writing this bill and lobbying for it are the usual suspects. The Colorado Children’s Campaign “convened” something it dubbed the School Finance Partnership, predictably dominated by educrats from the Colorado Association of School Boards, Colorado Association of School Executives, and the Colorado Education Association (aka, the teachers union), along with the Denver Metro Chamber, mostly liberal foundations and some cooperative business people. When the question of more spending and higher taxes for public schools comes up, their answer is always “yes, much more.” After all, “it’s for the children” (and the unions).