Hollywood director Rob Reiner has marshaled California’s forces of compassion in preparation for a grand showdown: a June 6 ballot referendum seeking to create a statewide universal-preschool program.

Proposition 82 proposes that California provide free preschool for any four-year-old whose parents request it. This generosity is expected to cost over $2 billion per year, to be extracted through an income-tax hike on individuals making over $400,000 annually. To the vast majority of voters with sublunary incomes, the proposal is seductive: It seems to offer something for nothing.

But there are reasons to resist this temptation.

Around 65 percent of California’s four-year-olds already attend preschool. The goal of Proposition 82 is to enroll 70 percent of the state’s four-year-olds in the public-preschool program, while an additional 10 percent or so would attend private preschools. So why the huge cost for such a marginal increase in enrollment?

Part of the reason is that Proposition 82 is not at all targeted to help those most in need. In fact, the plan is the opposite of targeted: It is blind, bloated, and indiscriminate.

According to a study done by California’s former legislative analyst William Hamm, now a managing director with the independent consulting firm LECG, 75 percent of the massive universal-preschool budget would go to families who would send their children to preschool anyway, without the help of the program. Almost 25 percent of the program’s funding–more than $500 million–would subsidize families making over $100,000 a year. Only 8.4 percent of the budget would be spent on high-risk children who otherwise wouldn’t attend preschool.

So Proposition 82 would create a massive state bureaucracy to provide a universal service that the vast majority of affected Californians already can–and already do–provide for themselves. Even if you saw nothing intrinsically wrong with targeting a tiny segment of private citizens for a $2 billion earned-income tax hit, this is a fiscal boondoggle.

On top of its wastefulness, Proposition 82 would create a set of expensive and nonsensical requirements for California’s preschool teachers. By 2014, preschool teachers in the state program would be required to have a four-year college degree. Further, “by July 2016, teachers would also need to hold a new early-learning teaching credential.”

As it stands now, only about one third of California’s preschool teachers have college degrees. This is not much of an issue, because the skills required to teach four-year-olds are quite different from what is taught in a college classroom. Demanding college credentials for preschool teachers allows Proposition 82’s supporters to boast about their commitment to “quality education.” But in reality, the requirements would accomplish little aside from making preschool teachers harder to recruit and more expensive to retain. They would also destroy the jobs of many effective and hardworking teachers who don’t have the time, money, or ability to earn college degrees. Perhaps some of these hard realities have begun seeping into the minds of California’s well-intentioned voters. Opinion polls show that Proposition 82 is still likely to pass, but the margin has been narrowing: According to the Public Policy Institute of California, about 55 percent of likely voters said they supported the proposition in February, with only 34 opposed. But by April, support had dropped to 51 percent, while opposition levels reached 40 percent.

For those who insist on thrusting the clumsy arm of the state farther into the realm of preschool provision, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has backed an alternative plan that is more targeted and less requirement-heavy. It would employ means testing to focus subsidies on low-income families. It would abstain from creating a massive new state-run program. And it would not wreak havoc on the teacher market by creating misguided credentialing requirements.

The preponderance of facts and common sense converge on a single conclusion: No on 82.