Wealth & Money Quote by Matt Gonzalez

“I don’t think the schools are getting as much money as they should” is the kind of political sentence that looks soft until you notice how it’s engineered. Gonzalez isn’t arguing about pedagogy or outcomes; he’s staking out moral terrain. “Schools” is one of the safest nouns in public life: it stands for kids, neighborhoods, second chances. Once you plant your flag there, the opposition risks sounding like they’re voting against children, not against a line item.

The phrase “as much money as they should” is doing two jobs at once. It’s deliberately nonspecific, which makes it expandable. It can mean teacher salaries, classroom supplies, special education compliance, after-school programs, facility repairs, or simply the idea that a rich city/state is failing to meet its obligations. That vagueness is strategic: it invites broad agreement without committing to a number, a revenue source, or the politically messy tradeoffs (taxes, pension liabilities, police budgets, administrative bloat) that would turn consensus into conflict.

The subtext is a challenge to priorities. Gonzalez is hinting that the budget is a values document and that current values are misaligned. In late-20th/early-21st-century urban politics, “schools are underfunded” often doubles as a critique of austerity logic and of the quiet ways inequality gets normalized through public institutions. It’s also a coalition-builder: parents, unions, and progressives can all hear their own grievances inside it.

It works because it’s hard to rebut without sounding callous, and because it frames funding not as a technical debate but as a test of civic decency.