With a $1 billion shortfall, state lawmakers have to cut the budget. There’s no way around it. But do the newly empowered Republicans, who regained control of the House this year, really want to start the budget-cutting by taking food out the mouths of poor children?
The three Republicans on the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee this past week refused to provide additional funding for the growing Start Smart Nutrition Program.
That means poor kids who eat breakfast at school for free will have to pay 30 cents a meal for the last few months of this school year. The Colorado Department of Education had requested an additional $124,229 for the current budget year ending in June — a small price to pay for ensuring thousands of kids start the school day off without hunger pangs.
We think the GOP’s move was bad from a policy standpoint, but it’s equally bad, politically.
And then there was this comment from Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, who voted against the request: “As a family guy myself with children and grandchildren, I take a very strong responsibility to earn money to feed my own family.”
We’ll skip the long sermon about the worst recession since the Great Depression. And we’ll relinquish our soapbox on high unemployment rates. Instead, we’ll focus on the children.
Even if one is so hard-hearted as to believe that all the parents of these needy kids are lying on the couch, refusing to work, is it appropriate to take that out on children?
For some, it may not be so tough to find 30 cents a day for breakfast. But for others, it could mean trying to pay attention to math while their stomach growls.
We would have hoped that Lambert and the others would have first thought about those who cannot reasonably be blamed for being hungry.
Instead, he chose to hold himself up as a paragon of personal responsibility.
We realize the state’s budget situation requires difficult choices. Colorado has operated as a lean government operation for quite some time.
Yet, in 2007, when legislators were contemplating increasing their session per diem to pay for lodging and food, this editorial board supported them. The per diem payment for lawmakers who live outside the metro area went from $99 a day to $150 a day.
We couldn’t help but notice in a story The Post did last month that Lambert availed himself of the full 120 days of allowances for the prior legislative session. At $150 a day, he received $18,000 from the state of Colorado to pay for his expenses, presumably including breakfast.
We’re not suggesting lawmakers shouldn’t accept their per diem. By and large, we think they’re underpaid for what they do.
But we also couldn’t help but take out our calculator to figure that Lambert’s $18,000 would pay for 60,000 breakfast fees at 30 cents a piece.
Finding an extra $124,000 in this tight budget to feed poor kids before they start school isn’t easy, but there are other places to cut.
