Sparkly, semiattired Lolla kids are this weekend swarming around such oft-deserted environs as Van Buren Street, Jackson Boulevard and State Street.

Welcome. Your presence and youthful energy could not be more timely. Go ahead and fill the sidewalks. We’ll jostle past you. It beats feeling alone.

Given the media stories this past week about the NASCAR gripes over state subsidies (cry us a river), it’s worth noting that the Lollapalooza music festival shows up here each summer without such subsidies and even writes an annual check of around $11 million to the Chicago Park District.

CEO Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a man who tells us he believes in balanced budgets, pointed out to us this week that this injection of private cash from C3 Presents is a vital component of the parks’ fiscal picture. Ramirez-Rosa likes Lollapalooza, which pays a premium for its location, to be right where it likes to be. In Grant Park. His flagship.

So does Chicago’s hospitality sector, which has lots of downtown rooms to fill. Not a problem on Lolla weekend.

It’s also worth noting that Lollapalooza is not just one event of many. It’s a singular thing. (Ask your kids, if necessary). This is the one weekend of the year when the music industry sees Chicago not just as a lucrative, multivenue stop on a thousand touring schedules, but as a tastemaker, a transmitter of music culture. Artists can and do break out there.

The audience for the four days is expected to number some 460,000 attendees, and we hear another 40,000 or so were on the standby list. We’re always skeptical of economic impact figures, but when the numbers get this big, only a fool cannot see that the money being spent in our city is crucial.

We don’t like the sales-tax increase one bit, but it was well-timed for this weekend if you do. Let’s not forget, too, that those 460,000 festivalgoers also are paying a 9% city amusement tax on top of their hefty ticket prices. And many of them were paying yet more when they got to ticketed after-parties, too.

Put all that together and this city has good reason to embrace a festival that, after 20 incarnations in Sweet Home Chicago, deserves to be seen as part of our summer furniture. Happy Lolla kids could be seen Friday — it’s not like they are hard to spot — several miles away from the festival grounds, having fun, sitting in eateries, making our trains safer by their presence and filling the city with energy.

We bet a few of those from out of town even dream about moving here amid the euphoria of the moment. You can’t put an economic impact figure on that.

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