This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Lost in the fight over the omnibus spending bill just signed by President Obama is what's not in it,

including the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher for low-income parents to choose a better

school. Cato's Jason Bedrick offers his

analysis. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is a voucher for low income

families living in the district that allows them to go to the school of their

choice.

There's a few thousand students that have benefited from this program and continue to benefit

from it, although the Obama administration every year has tried to kill it.

Early this year, there was an attempt to reauthorize the program which is set to expire next year.

It was it even had prominent Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate including Corey

Booker and Diane Feinstein. Nevertheless the Senate leadership was able to block it. And so the

best hope of reauthorizing the program was to get it into this year's omnibus.

So, and it's worth noting that the Washington, D.C. public school system

is among both the worst and most expensive in the United States.

Yeah, so it was actually Cato that first pointed this out a few years ago.

The district was only publishing their operating expenditures but they were leaving out the cost of capital

expenditures you know like school buildings like school buildings exactly which are

sort of necessary to deliver proper education.

We found that actually the district was spending close to $30,000 per pupil at one point a few years ago.

It's come down slightly since then, but it's still among the most expensive school

...