For all x, the idea that we ought to “fully fund x” sounds very appealing. That’s largely because the phrase “fully fund x” implies to most people that x being partially funded is an unusual situation that ought to be corrected. In fact, the way federal budgeting works it’s actually common for programs to be less-than-”fully” funded, so you need to peer into the details. Sarah Palin, for example, yesterday called for fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This is contrary to John McCain’s record, but lots of things are contrary to McCain’s record and they’re not necessarily bad ideas. So what about IDEA? Sara Mead explains:
In contrast to the voucher proposals, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Palin’s proposal to fully fund IDEA. It’s just terribly expensive. IDEA “full funding” is determined by a formula that multiplies the number of children with special needs, by the average per pupil expenditure in the United States, by 40 percent. For fiscal year 2008, fully funding IDEA would cost more than $25 billion dollars–more than double the roughly $11 billion the federal government spent on IDEA Part B grants this year. “Fully funding” IDEA next year would require roughly $15 billion in additional federal education spending–hardly consistent with Sen. McCain’s proposals to freeze domestic spending, and nearly as much as the $18 billion cost of Sen. Barack Obama’s entire early education and K-12 school reform proposals.
Long story short, more money for IDEA seems like a reasonable idea to me. But so does more money for a lot of education initiatives. The McCain-Palin proposal of cutting overall education spending, while more than doubling federal spending on IDEA doesn’t seem to me to have a compelling rationale.
As I said yesterday, all children have serious needs and we ought to be trying to meet all their needs. Insofar as some children have special needs they will, of course, need more help than other children. But the moral logic of focusing single-mindedly on the needs of families with disabled children while ignoring the “normal” problems faced by poor families more generally simply because a certain number of prominent conservatives are parents of disabled children is perverse.
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