United States | News & Politics

The ~~rich~~ lower middle class and up aren’t doing anything wrong here. They’re being offered free lunch and their kids are accepting it.

You need to think like a libertarian. "If they're all getting free food they're all stealing because taxes are theft."

Cruelty is the point.

Because feeding and supporting children doesn't get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.

They care about nobody. What was the last Republican sponsored bill that would objectively make anyone's life better?

Somehow they have their base frothing at the mouth about these Democrat-led initiatives that help folks (not just Democrats), yet they put forth no proposal to help anyone.

They are the party of taking things away from people not like them, but also the party of taking things away from people just like them. They are not the party of helping anyone. I cannot fathom how the large portion of their base who could be helped by such programs fails to see this.

I just plain think school should provide free lunch anyway. The kids are forced to be there, might as well feed 'em.

That's because the problem from their perspective is that the people who would defraud public services exist, and their rage is high enough that they accept the people who simply use public services as collateral damage.

Bah, who am I kidding... They don't care about humans. They're just interested in that money going towards private businesses (Especially if they have a generous lobbyist from and/or stake in said business or industry)

The problem is that any system that involves humans will have some level of waste and corruption. So they will always be able to point to that one kid who got a lunch he wasn't supposed to as a sign that the whole system should be destroyed.

If the children are fed, they won't want to work in the chicken processing plants, have you considered that? What are we going to do, pay adults a living wage to process chickens? Get out of here.

I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.

The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.

I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it's simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.

So this is especially evil to me.

Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.

A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn't realize that most of these kids didn't have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week... Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.

Oh, no, no, it's "Think of the Children"! Saving them requires actual effort.

/s

I'll volunteer if you're around me lmao

The line "Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs" just cracks me up. "People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don't like".

Thi budget has the word "Biiden" in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words "woke ideology". Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.

Fun fact, some places do force inmates to pay for their own incarceration and will hand you a bill when you leave https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-of-states-allow-people-to-be-charged-for-time-behind-bars

I see a big problem with the opt-out being abusive parents could pocket the money without feeding the child.

Money isn't the only barrier to food security.