New Yorkers, your lawmakers want you to know that because they don’t like Trump (and are total lackeys of the teachers unions), you have to pay the price.
So, at least, runs the implicit argument behind whining from Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand over President Trump’s talk of shutting down the federal Department of Education.
The DOE, you see, funnels $5.5 billion a year into New York.
“If that money is jeopardized, what I can tell you will happen, localities lose that money, they will have to raise taxes,” Hochul complained.
In fact, Trump’s talking of cutting the bureaucracy, not the funding for actual schools or schoolchildren.
But nor should it be unthinkable for Hochul in her bank-busting budgetary brilliance to ever find any savings elsewhere.
Let alone in state-only education spending, which (per the Citizens Budget Commission) for the 2024-25 school year will be $39 billion — bigger than the GDP of many countries.
The moaning is especially laughable since Hochul has totally surrendered on her efforts to trim school outlays in districts with plummeting enrollment.
That is, it’s not that New York can’t save billions in school aid with some rational thrift: After all, statewide school spending now tops $36,000 per student, laughably far above the national average.
It’s that Hochul and the rest of the Democrats don’t want to do those things.
They’d rather inflict yet more pain on average New Yorkers than upset the teachers unions, making hardworking families pay for the political convenience of our governing elites.
The whole scene gives the lie to Gillibrand’s blubbering that “the Trump administration is stealing from our children, our teachers, and our families to give tax breaks to the wealthy.”
Straight talk time: The federal DOE is a bloated, useless agency and its demise is long overdue.
That Hochul & Co. are using Trump’s utterly justified targeting of it as an excuse to explain why, yet again, Joe Public will be left holding the bag is beyond pathetic.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
