A Penny on the Dollar

The more details emerge about Proposition 71, California's $3 billion stem-cell research project, the more it all looks like a big lie that will cost us billions of dollars more than we were told.

Forget that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the nonprofit set up to disburse the funds, has been disturbingly secretive about how it intends to spend the public's money. Forget about the worries over whether grant committees will ignore scientific merit and just dole out cash to their cronies. Just look at the money for a second. Back in 2004, the initiative's supporters repeatedly promised that the public subsidy - estimated at the time as $6 billion, including interest - would be substantially offset by a fortune in royalties from treatments that would inevitably spring from such research. One week before the election, Robert Klein, the real-estate mogul who spearheaded the campaign, went on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and promised, "The state of California will gain new jobs, new tax revenues, and intellectual property revenues to pay back the taxpayers."

Or consider the official ballot...