As a plank in my platform, I support using public monies to contribute to a national “Montessori-style Pre-K for All.” The first link below is to an article from 2013 presenting the case for “The Importance of Preschool and Childcare for Working Mothers.” The second link below is to a recent piece in The Atlantic cautioning that “The New Preschool is Crushing Kids.” The third link is to the Montessori webpage describing the preschool that I remember, and was fortunate enough to greatly benefit from, the kind of preschool that everyone should have access to.
This is how I would fund a national commitment along these lines of $200 billion over a ten-year period. There is already a need for a tax on the use of short-term debt (with maturity of less than a year) to discourage giant corporations from engaging in the kind of excessive use of “leverage” that contributed to the Great Recession. The “too big to fail” among these giant corporations should be broken up in any case, but the dangers of excessive leverage will continue to be an issue even after they are. The liberal capitalist economist Luigi Zingales has estimated that a tax of 1% on outstanding short-term debt would raise $21.5 billion annually from the nine largest institutions as they exist at present all by themselves, money that should continue to be raised even after the “too big to fail” are broken up.
