The California Legislature is busy as they try to decide how to spend all the “extra revenue” that came in this year as a result of higher tax rates and an improving economy.  For anyone interested in the details of the process, here is a link to the budget conference committee agendas and you can see how the differences between the Senate and Assembly are resolved:

http://sbud.senate.ca.gov/conferenceagendas

One of the major points of contention this year is how much of the “surplus” should be spent on what is being called Early Childhood Education instead of the more plebian term – child care.  Because as one advocate for increased spending on state subsidized child care said:  “learning begins as birth and this is an investment in the education of children because as you know – they are our future”.  OMG – how trite and how deceitful.

You can see from the agenda for K-12 and Higher Education, the game being played is by calling this program education, it can be squeezed into the Prop 98 guarantee formula and have the funds locked into the law.  Very tricky.

But what I find interesting is that the Assembly would like to pay for an additional 20,000 seats in these programs and the fiscal estimate is roughly $600 million dollars this year but is estimated to cost almost $ 1 BILLION dollars over the next few years!  That means it will cost the California taxpayers almost $50,000 a year for each child in this program.  Seems like a lot to me but then the plan is also to unionize the child care workers and you know what that costs!