A Gourmand’s restaurant review goes like this: The food’s terrible, but the portions are enormous, so let’s eat there again.
It also happens to be Mayor de Blasio’s formula for city education: It’s not very good, so let’s pay more for it.
Dollar Bill’s trip to Albany was not an excellent adventure. He went to lobby for a tax hike for pre-kindergarten and left looking like a rookie still wet behind the ears. You know you have to improve your game when legislators who specialize in serving up corruption poke holes in your argument without breaking a sweat.
Less than a month into the job, de Blasio’s obnoxious claim that he has a blank check because he won the election is showing diminishing returns. Even Albany’s rank-and-file was not impressed when he acted as if his wish was their command.
Thanks to Gov. Cuomo’s resistance, de Blasio’s vow to soak the rich is all but dead. Cuomo, who, like all the legislators, is up for re-election, called the mayor’s bluff by offering to have the state pay for universal pre-K, but de Blasio won’t take yes for an answer.
One result is that the charge by a Cuomo aide that the mayor wants a “tax for taxing sake” looks to be spot on. Another is that de Blasio gave away his plan to use billions in city surpluses to pay off his union pals.
Asked by a lawmaker why he needs a tax hike when he’ll have a projected $4.3 billion extra over the next 18 months, de Blasio said
resolving lapsed labor contracts means “there will be a cost to pay.”
Pop — that was the sound of champagne corks in union headquarters. Cuomo got state workers to agree to zero raises over three years, but de Blasio apparently isn’t even going to try.
Still, the liberal nostrum that pre-K is a guaranteed good investment might have swept aside the skeptics if de Blasio had convincingly answered basic questions on his plan. But he stumbled and fell back on platitudes and fuzzy math.
His claim that there are plenty of empty classrooms available and that he could produce “high-quality” programs and teachers for 54,000 full-day students by September didn’t pass the laugh test. He’s the same guy, after all, who can’t get anywhere on time, including the hearing.
An early exchange was revealing.
After citing statistics showing that only 25 percent of New York City high-school grads are ready for college, he said, “That’s the crisis we’re facing. Our school system is simply not serving many of our children.”
Then he spent the next two hours arguing that he needed $2.6 billion more for new programs over the next five years, without mentioning how he would fix the existing “crisis” he cited.
That turned his presentation into a long, non sequitur — the system stinks, let’s just expand it and throw more money at it.
The lack of logic does more than undercut his tax-hike plan. It also reveals again that he has no true reform agenda. He argues education will end his tale of two cities, but his solutions are tired throwbacks to yesteryear: Raise the price and lower the standards.
The city already spends more than $20 billion a year on education, and if de Blasio gets his way, the total could easily reach $25 billion or $26 billion by the end of his term. Yet not once has he spelled out what he wants to achieve and how he would justify spending $25,000 or more per student.
If he has a vision, he’s keeping it to himself.
All we know is that he intends to squeeze charters, keep failing schools open and curtail the use of tests in evaluating students and teachers. His positions parrot those of the unions.
If that’s de Blasio’s idea of reform, New York is going backwards.
And there’s no justification for paying billions more for failure.
Fools rule
My favorite line of late comes from a former Peruvian finance minister, who tells The Wall Street Journal: “Bad ideas take a long time to die.”
What, Peru has ObamaCare, too?
Hill’s Libya flip’
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” Hillary Clinton famously and furiously demanded to know during Senate questioning about the Benghazi attack. That was last year, and finally, we’re getting some hints about the answer.
It turns out that Benghazi still matters to her, or at least to her presidential campaign. Her polling probably shows it’s damaging her — otherwise, Clinton wouldn’t have raised the topic at an innocuous event Monday.
During what was probably a paid gig at the National Auto Dealers Association Convention in New Orleans — she gets as much as $400,000 for a boilerplate speech — the former secretary of state used a gentle question-and-answer format to call the attack the “biggest regret” in her four years at State.
“It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans — two diplomats, and now it is public, so I can say two CIA operatives,” she said. “You make these choices based on imperfect information, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be unforeseen consequences, unpredictable twists and turns.”
Notice she called it a “tragedy,” not a terror attack, and said that she regretted it, but not that she bears any responsibility. And the bit about “unforeseen consequences” and “unpredictable twists and turns” suggests she had no way of anticipating an attack that fell on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
Documents prove otherwise, but since she wasn’t under oath, anything goes. And her mush was good enough for The New York Times, which swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Its reporter wrote that the remarks “represent some of Mrs. Clinton’s most candid about the matter.”
Candid and the Clintons — now there’s an oxymoron.
Christie ‘hide’ is exposed
Chris Christie is acting as if he’s guilty of something. It’s probably smart of him to tone down his act while the Bridgegate probes continue, including a federal one, but I’m surprised he’s not more visibly reasserting his innocence or, at least, ignorance.
The Jersey gov largely has disappeared from public view, leaving the field to the Democrats and their media handmaidens who want to damage him. Even if there is no smoking gun that shows he knew of the Port Authority traffic plot, the hardening of public suspicion will make it difficult for him to reclaim broad support. A presidential campaign already looks far less promising.
Those stakes make his retreat a strange one.
Fans aren’t that inn-$ane
They used the Super Bowl as an excuse to gouge, and now some New Jersey hotel owners are stuck with lots of empty rooms. No wonder. With standard rooms in off-the-turnpike joints going for as much as $800 a night, “vacancy” lights are still on.
Maybe P. T. Barnum was wrong. Maybe there aren’t enough suckers to go around.