Former Democrat New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio’s socialist push to offer free universal child care resulted in dozens of empty buildings and a $100 million price tag — so far.
Five years after de Blasio limped out of office, the “city is still footing the rent and utility bills for the 28 facilities — a $99.3 million-and-counting boondoggle blamed on the ‘terrible execution’ of … de Blasio’s ambitious universal preschool expansion,” the New York Post reports.
“The de Blasio-era scramble to construct 47 ‘initiative projects’ for the then-mayor’s ‘3-K For All’ pet program — giving free full-day care for 3-year-olds — resulted in the slew of ‘phantom’ preschools that remain devoid of students,” adds the Post report.
Many of the locations don’t have enough students to justify a preschool, even if it were to open up. One 3-K location in Queens cost taxpayers $10.8 million but was located in “a section of the city that already had trouble filling existing early childhood education seats[.]” There’s a pre-school just a few blocks from this site that cannot fill its slots. Why build another one?
Meanwhile, other parts of the city are desperate for daycare centers.
New York’s current mayor, the communist–Islamist Zohran Mamdani, has promised to finish the job.
One source fired off a rhetorical question to the Post, which I am happy to answer: “They realized [afterward that] it wasn’t a good location. … If they didn’t think the need was there, why did they pick the site in the first place?”
First off, we’re talking about Democrats in New York City, so this might be a form of graft. The building owners might be receiving payoffs.
Either way, the overall reason is an ongoing lack of moral hazard for the government, or de Blasio, or the Democrat Party.
Socialism will always fail because the money does not belong to those who control it. Therefore, they have zero incentive to invest wisely or honorably. All de Blasio wanted was to show he was doing something. It wasn’t his $100 million, so there was no incentive to choose locations where a daycare center would thrive. His only incentive was political: rent and renovate a bunch of buildings so he could place signs out front that said de Blasio was delivering free child care.
We’ve seen this before. After Barry Obama pissed away 800 million dollars on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, remember the signs placed at various locations that read “Putting America Back to Work” or “Project Funded by the Recovery Act?” When the truth is that most of the money “morphed into a giant welfare bill—by design.”
When it’s your money on the line, you’re looking for value of some kind. That’s why capitalism works.
When it’s not your money, when it’s taxpayer money, you don’t care about value. Why should you? It’s not your money. That’s why socialism not only sucks, but requires enforcement through threats of violence.
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