CHOICE FOR TAXPAYERS: GET REFUNDS, OR FUEL FAST-GROWING GOVERNMENT?

So the question of what to do with Missouri's stake in the money flowing in from the state's settlement with the tobacco industry will dominate this year's legislative session. At least lots of folks in the news media and in both political parties are saying so.

Many among my colleagues are trying to make this difficult, but it's really quite simple. Herewith, an attempt at explanation. As you read, reflect on a couple of fundamental questions: Do you want the money to be classified as total state revenue for purposes of computing refunds back to you taxpayers under the Hancock Amendment? Or would you prefer that this money be excluded from total state revenue, such that the politicians will be freed up to dream up new ways to spend the money? If you favor the latter, keep in mind that during the 1990s, the state government has already been growing consistently at between two and three times the rate of inflation. Anyone who says we should spend the money is saying that this growth in government isn't fast enough and is expressing a determination to grow it even faster.

Missouri has an amount coming in that used to be estimated at $6.7 billion over 25 years. More recently, those in the know have widely agreed that the actual amount will be far less. Ideas for spending whatever windfall we have coming are as common as blackberries in July.

Popular among these are smoking-cessation programs and others aimed at persuading teens never to start. Missed in all this fervor is the fact that, as anti-smoking efforts gain steam, smoking is actually on the rise among youngsters nationwide. It is increasingly clear that where such exhortations are concerned, young people's desire to engage in the discouraged behavior varies inversely with the number of anti-smoking commercials viewed, the number of anti-smoking billboards glimpsed. Never mind. With modern liberalism and its spending cohorts, it's the intention that counts.

Still other ideas abound. Missouri's top education chief is pushing for spending $30 million annually for "universal preschool," to put the state even further into the day-care business than it already is. This education commissioner Robert Bartman would do, either by the public schools directly competing with private preschools and day care operators, or by contracting the job out to them. The latter case contracting out to private operators raises some fascinating questions that Bartman probably wishes he had never mentioned. At a House hearing last week, a clever representative asked public education chief Bartman -- a determined foe of allowing parents to choose schools -- whether this contracting out approach wouldn't amount to a form of publicly funded "vouchers" for parents to choose a privately operated preschool. "Oh, no," he said, giving the appearance of being caught unawares. Heavens, it wouldn't be that! We can't have such wickedness!

Exactly how, though, does the Bartman proposal differ from what many of us have spent years fighting for -- the right of parents to choose where to educate their own children, without financial penalty? And isn't his suggestion a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamental justice of what we've been fighting for all these years?

But I digress. What about it then? Shall you receive a larger tax refund? Or shall a fast-growing state government grow, and spend, even faster?

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.