Four Democrats on Increasing Gaming Taxes for Education

wplog

Monday, Dec. 10, 2007 | 8:12 p.m.

The state teachers union wants to raise gaming taxes to pay higher teacher salaries and for education resources. If you lived here, would you vote for such an initiative?

Hillary Clinton

I’m going to leave it to the people who can vote for it. Teachers are right to try to get more support for teachers. How a state does that is up to a state. Nevada needs to look at every option available to it.

Barack Obama

In Illinois I favored a shift from exclusive reliance on property taxes to a partial use of the income tax to increase funding for schools that don’t have enough resources.

As president, I can make a difference by making sure that every school has enough money. We’ve got to put more into early childhood education, pay our teachers more and do a better job of training.

But money alone is not enough without reform. The federal government can establish best practices for school districts and the government can pony up more in paying teachers and recruiting more folks with experience in math and science.

John Edwards

I don’t live here. I’m running for president.

My response as president is to determine a way we as a nation can deal with this.

We need a significant increase in education funding, making universal pre-K available.

We need to fund bonuses for teachers who teach in diffi cult areas, up to $15,000 a year.

We need to reduce class sizes, help finance the construction of schools, reform No Child Left Behind. All those things increase the availability of state and local money to pay for things like teachers’ salaries.

Bill Richardson

That’s a real local issue. I’m not a taxer. I’ve cut taxes. Spending on education is a matter of budget priorities. I would shift funding to education.

We need preschool for every child under 4, full-day kindergarten, federal programs to assist states, art in the schools. I would work with school boards to try to find testing and accountability standards different from those in No Child Left Behind. I would make an Apollo moon program effort to create 250 science and math academies. To help students, the government should pay off college loans in exchange for national service.

— Las Vegas Sun political reporters Michael J. Mishak and J. Patrick Coolican compiled this report.