A safety net from the abyss

Plenty has been made of the dumb remarks last week by Assemblyman Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, in an e-mail to a constituent, so we'd like to focus on the smart things Beers wrote.

In case you missed it, Beers made sweeping generalizations about casino workers and their children, such as: "These youngsters are prone to dropping out of school, reproducing illegitimate children, often while little more than children themselves, abusing drugs and alcohol more frequently and even killing themselves more often than people who do value education."

That brought a deserved blast of criticism against Beers, who later apologized and said he was playing devil's advocate.

What didn't get much attention came later in his e-mail, when Beers wrote: "In my mind, we should focus government services on a safety net to capture and lift from the abyss those children who can find value in education. That is why you will find me consistently advocating cuts to programs that offer services to adults, and consistently advocating increased spending on programs that offer services to children, and that provide youngsters who value education a better life."

That makes perfectly good sense. The odd thing is it comes from the leading critic of the tax and budget plan proposed by Gov. Kenny Guinn, who made essentially the same argument in his state of the state address.

Maybe these guys are in the same party after all.

Guinn's message, in a nutshell, was "I refuse to balance this budget on the backs of our children, senior citizens and the poor."

He called for more spending on education, Medicaid, Nevada Check-Up (which would give health care to 25,000 needy children). He would implement full-day kindergarten. He would spend $40 million on textbooks, computers and school supplies.

Lest we forget, this is the governor who froze 1,500 state jobs (eliminating 500 of them permanently) and took the ax to state departments three times to the tune of $200 million.

Beers has argued there may be as much as $530 million more to be slashed from state budgets. But when last we looked, he was talking about cutting money intended to improve Nevada's lowest-achieving schools, to expand Nevada Check-Up, and to recruit teachers to Nevada.

There may be some areas of state government that can still be trimmed, but deeper cuts will begin to affect basic services and higher education. The rest constitutes the very safety net Beers supposes can save Nevada's poor and uneducated children from the abyss.