It looks a lot like the justification for schools: Places with very pronounced inequality tend to have a lot of societal problems (up to and including the massive underclass deciding to behead members of the upper class). I suppose if you want to get really nihilistic, you can say that you don't care if society at large goes into the toilet as long as you can achieve short-term monetary gains such as could be obtained by cutting funding to schools, but I think most people agree that maintaining a well-functioning society is a good goal for the government.