Reblogged from GADFLYONTHEWALLBLOG
Gold!
There’s gold in them thar schools!
Don’t believe me?
When you drive by an inner city school, it doesn’t exactly look like the Taj Mahal. Does it? Even relatively upscale suburban schools wouldn’t be mistaken for a house on MTV Cribs. And some of those fly-by night charter schools look more like prisons than Shangri-La.
But I’ve got it on good authority that there’s $1.3 trillion available for someone who knows how to take it.
That someone is Harold Levy, an expert on how to get rich through school privatization.
The former chancellor of the New York City School System has begun a second career managing an investment company.
“For-profit education is one of the largest U.S. investment markets, currently topping $1.3 trillion in value,” according to the Website for one of his master classes for rich investors.
Wooo-weee! That’s a lot of money!
To put it in context, that’s more than 10 times the amount the federal government spends on education per year. And it’s all yummy profit!
So how do you get your hands on some of those delicious taxpayer greenbacks?
You gotta’ invest.
No! I don’t mean increase education budgets for traditional public schools that can barely make ends meet! I mean invest in shiny new charter schools.
Here’s how it works.
Lend money to a for-profit company to build a new charter school. If you do it just right, you’re almost guaranteed to double or triple your money in seven years.
You’ll want to take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC), which began in 2000 at the end of President Bill Clinton’s administration. This will give you a whooping 39 percent tax credit. But here’s the best part, since it’s money you’re lending, you also get interest on it! And if that weren’t enough, you can piggyback all kinds of additional federal tax credits on top of that – things like historic preservation or job creation or Brownfield’s credits.
That doesn’t sound legal, does it? But it is!