Lawrence Journal-World opinion section

To the editor:

After reading about the Kansas Legislature’s plan for pilfering money from children’s programs (called “securitization”), I felt compelled to do the math.

Currently, Kansas kids receive the money from a tobacco settlement that pays at average of $57 million per year and runs through 2025. That means Kansas kids can expect $570 million by 2025. The new projected structure would allow a maximum of $50 million per year (that’s a 12 percent cut). Yet even with such a massive funding cut, the Legislature would only have the revenue to fund 80 percent of that budget if securitization occurs (or 70 percent of the current budget).

Obviously the Legislature needs access to money to cauterize the wounds of failed tax strategy and budget bleeding, but there is a cost-benefit to everything, so let’s go back to the numbers.  Just last month, the state fell $53 million short of its projected tax revenue. Evidence shows that this will continue, but let’s suppose that it gets better ($25 million per month). At that rate we will have gone through the entire sum of money that was meant to fund children’s programs for a decade in 16 months.

If you are like me and can see the humanity behind numbers you are already appalled, but, to me, the saddest number has yet to be mentioned. As legislators rob from children with no voice in our government, the oldest current recipient of aid through these programs won’t be old enough to vote against this madness until 2028!