As a public service announcement for the people of Chicago, I’d like to urge each and every one of you to beware of any claims by Mayor Emanuel about how he’s expanding preschool for poor kids, because I have a feeling he’s preparing the campaign ads as we speak.
To make matters worse, it guarantees that a couple thousand low-income kids—the very children who need pre-K programming the most—won’t get it.
The most efficient, least expensive way to do that would be to pay for it up front. The $4 million-a-year tab is relative chump change in the Chicago Public Schools’ annual budget of $5.5 billion.
In that way, he’s claiming that the program won’t cost the taxpayers anything.
In the case of the parking meter deal, we’re likely to wind up paying as much as $10 billion to the people who gave us $1 billion up front.
And by peers, I’m not talking about kids who go to, oh, Parker, Latin, Lab, or any other private school where Goldman’s execs would send their own children.
