It's astonishing this is a thing. I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free with no questions asked. Where I live, kids can get breakfast too, however I've heard that isn't universal in the state.
The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here that are suffering. I have a brother with disabilities and there are "lines" drawn all the time with funding that are either all or nothing. If you cross a line, you lose funding. It encourages them to work less, save less money, and be more reliant on state funding. Why haven't we figured out gradients yet? For example, above this line you get 90% of costs covered. Above this line 80%. Above this line 70%. etc... etc... etc...
dredmorbius · 8h ago
Gradients introduce a tremendous measurement problem.
It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth).
This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system.
There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)
dredmorbius · 5h ago
Oh, and there's the deadweight loss of those who would qualify for a benefit (under law) but fail either to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops, or who do hoop-jump, but are still denied benefits, whether through bureaucratic error, inefficiency, corruption, or other reasons.
TFA describes the first circumstance.
Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:
Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.
I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).
I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:
- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.
- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.
Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.
candiddevmike · 9h ago
During COVID, school lunch was free, and most school served free bag lunches over the summer too. That ended in June 2022. Congress could've kept it going for a pittance, but alas...
humanrebar · 8h ago
State government, local government, and local philanthropy (like the chamber of commerce, etc.) could also buy lunch.
I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.
thinkingtoilet · 8h ago
That's what happened in MA. It was COVID that started the program and then we kept it up because we're decent people.
ryandrake · 8h ago
A lot of the country, majorities in many states, are not decent people.
tecirpinslime · 8h ago
My significant other work at a school during Covid where they were giving free breakfasts and lunches.
The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in. The staff always wanted to err on the side of caution, because they didn’t want any kids to miss out. We’re talking sometimes over 200 lunches that were discarded in a day. Some things could be reused, but a lot was thrown away.
It was against the rules to do anything but either give them to a student, or throw them away.
mjevans · 8h ago
It sounds like there were a few problems identified.
* Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window)
* Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable
* No system of reservation to try to forecast load
There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.
GarnetFloride · 8h ago
Haven't you met people who refused a raise because they were scared of moving to a new tax bracket?
Same thing only this is where it actually happens.
SSJPython · 8h ago
The only people that do this are ones that have no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.
creer · 1h ago
> no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.
Which is how some parts of US taxation works, but not other parts. You seem to be in one part, and unaware of the rest. (And is a mix of taxation and other "eligibility" issues, with poorly advertised massive cliffs here and there for extra helpfulness).
ponector · 1h ago
Is it? There are situations where it makes sense to avoid a rise and stay in the tax bracket. Like if with 5k rise you loose a 10k childcare benefits provided by local municipality.
maxerickson · 1h ago
Yes, the anecdote about misunderstanding a particular thing may be broken if you introduce additional factors.
The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.
bombcar · 8h ago
Which is a surprisingly large percentage of the population.
Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free.
Most people like receiving a big fat refund.
Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.
jacknews · 8h ago
"It's astonishing this is a thing."
Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.
ponector · 1h ago
Free education means no one will value it. Education should not be free, just cheap. However there should be help and assistance to people who wants to get an education but cannot afford it.
Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
vlovich123 · 8h ago
[flagged]
bombcar · 8h ago
It's rarely cruelty. It's usually bureaucracy and unintended consequences and trying to be "nice".
Often you have a program created, with "free below X, sliding scale until no subsidy at Y" - done right, this is "perfect" in that each marginal dollar is lightly "taxed" (losing a subsidy is the same as a tax, from the worker's perspective).
This is great! Though let's say (theoretically) that the end result is a 1% "tax" for our family, so each dollar they increase income costs them a penny of subsidy. They probably have other subsidies besides school lunches, like WIC, or ACA, or whatever. Those are also sliding down at various amounts, which can cause it to start to get annoying. But it works.
Then the program is expanded, to be "nice" - even nicer! Now the subsidy is 100% below X, but they're going to also cover 100% up to Y! That's great! Everyone is better off now ... except now you have the situation where at Y + 1, you earned one more dollar, but lost potentially thousands in subsidy. This is NOT ACTUALLY WORSE than before, because at Y + 1 in both scenarios you have no subsidy, but it hurts much more in the second because the subsidy wasn't slowly being drained.
thomascgalvin · 8h ago
While this is generally true of a certain American political party, you see hard cutoff lines even in states like Massachusetts, where the majority of voters and politicians seem to be actively trying to make things better for people.
The real answer is that gradients are hard, and clear lines are easy. A shocking number of Americans don't understand how our income tax brackets work; they believe that if you cross the line into a higher income bracket, your entire income is taxed at that new, higher rate, and you end up losing money overall.
Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.
vlovich123 · 7h ago
You’re making the mistake assuming a political party is flawless or that a political party having power somehow obviates the need to be responsive to constituents who might take issue or be swayed to take issue with the policy changes you try to enact.
People like the ones I described exist in both parties but I think it’s telling that people assumed I’m talking about one political party because it made those slogans it’s brand. The hard lines vs gradient doesn’t make sense in terms of public because this doesn’t raise to the level of public discourse.
Also Massachusetts is a bad example because they enacted free lunches across the board. They may have gradient issues in other welfare programs but school lunches is something they’ve solved for now.
As for RCV being shot down, I don’t think it’s an education issue. I personally prefer approval voting as it’s simpler to explain and faster results. Not wanting to switch to RCV (specifically IRV) can have all sorts of reasons and claiming it’s because the electorate is dumb is the wrong take I think.
r00fus · 2h ago
> Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.
That's the ostensible reason - the reality is that Blue MAGA also really hates power challenges. Look no further than CA where they also shot down (even the possibility for local elections to consider) ranked choice voting.
mindslight · 7h ago
> Massachusetts ... also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.
The math wasn't "hard" - it was wrong. The decision process was to be instant runoff voting, which has significant problems. IRV is basically what people stuck in the two party mindset think they want so they can express support for a third party. But once a third party gains enough traction to become viable, perverse incentives (strategic voting) shows right back up again. What we really need is Ranked Choice ballots with Ranked Pairs decision process. This satisfies Condorcet which means that a winner is preferred by the majority of voters.
wqaatwt · 7h ago
Or just multi-member districts with a proportional system like STV..
mindslight · 5h ago
I'd definitely take that as well, but it's a much bigger change. Especially of deep government dynamics like how singular executives then get chosen by the representatives.
MisterTea · 8h ago
If only those people knew the hardships some people face with mental issues which hinder their ability to function normally on a day to day basis. Some people cant pull themselves out of bed let alone their bootstraps.
Onawa · 8h ago
The types of people who are against these social safety nets don't care. Unfortunately, they will only care if it directly affects them.
These people hold the mindset that if you are not disabled and don't have any learning disabilities, you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
There isn't any room for nuance with them, they will just call people who are neurodivergent "lazy" and "welfare queens".
SamBam · 8h ago
Except it does the opposite, because it disincentives you from raising your income above that line.
vlovich123 · 8h ago
The goal isn’t to make it easy for you to escape the system but more difficult under the theory that then you’re more self sufficient. It’s a stupid philosophy of course.
humanrebar · 8h ago
Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes.
The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.
apercu · 8h ago
> everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports
Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).
dani__german · 7h ago
Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver.
If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.
aaaja · 1h ago
Sports governing bodies in the UK are rapidly rewriting their policies to stop these men from competing in women's sports, after a recent Supreme Court judgement ruled this amounts to unlawful sex discrimination against women. So hopefully this ongoing insult to all the women who've worked so hard to compete in their sport of choice will soon be over.
That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.
vlovich123 · 8h ago
The problem is that sharp drop offs instead of gradients are a known and well documented problem as is the desire to get rid of the welfare state by one party. You don’t need to assume best intentions here when the GOP has consistently made it clear where their priorities lie on this topic. Oh and the GOP has constantly taken “starve the beast” and weaponized incompetence approaches to try and kill the programs they don’t like.
mcphage · 8h ago
That’s okay, because “teaches you self-reliance” is just a fig leaf. They don’t care if it actually happens or not, the point is to have something to point to, so when they’re criticized they can hit back with “Why are you against people learning self-reliance? Why do you want them to be dependent on the government?”
DisruptiveDave · 8h ago
"never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence"
mmastrac · 8h ago
I'm pretty sure this is malice. They know, they don't do anything.
grimcompanion · 8h ago
It's way too simple to categorize behavior like this into good/evil. It's a worthwhile thought experiment (and habit) to assume that everyone is trying to do the right thing, and try to understand how they might come to a different viewpoint than you.
relaxing · 8h ago
OK, so you endorse a policy which not only creates human suffering now but harms society and creates more human suffering in the future. The cost of fixing it is minuscule and outweighed by the future benefits.
What are the good faith arguments in favor of this?
- ignorance
- lack of critical reasoning skills
- religion
- sadism
- ?
grimcompanion · 7h ago
I absolutely don't endorse it. I just find it counterproductive to say things like "malice is the point".
I do have trouble finding good faith arguments in favor of this policy. It is cruel. But the people who decided to implement it aren't "other". They're humans who think they're good people (aside from a small minority of people who really don't care) and much as we'd like to think so we're not that different than them. If we can understand their justification, that's a step toward actually convincing them there is another way. And yes, I have changed many people's viewpoints with this level of patience, not everyone is too stupid/mean/insult of your choice to change their minds.
em-bee · 6h ago
assuming good will is the only way to get others to listen and eventually change their mind. because only if we have good will in common we are able to come to a solution that satisfies both sides.
it's the continuous assumption of malice that prevents people from listening to each other. and that is still the case even if there is actual malice. almost by definition, if you do not present the assumption for good will to the other side, they will have difficulty attributing good will to you, no matter whether they themselves are acting are maliciously or not.
relaxing · 6h ago
I didn’t mean you personally.
The people who decided to implement the policy believe that cruelty will create deterrence.
Persisting in this line of thinking despite centuries of cruelty and no end to the undesired behavior is what leads to sayings like “the cruelty is the point.” Psychologically, it’s well understood there are those who really get a kick out of making people suffer.
explodes · 8h ago
How did they give you the impression they were endorsing this?
relaxing · 6h ago
Because that’s who we’re talking about?
ryandrake · 8h ago
Sorry, but my imagination is clearly not robust enough to even begin to steelman a policy that puts children into debt over near zero-cost food at school, often publicly humiliating the child at the same time, without just sounding like a cruel cartoon villain.
mmastrac · 7h ago
I don't believe any of this, but I'll try. Please note that the below is not my personal belief, just an attempt to understand the "other side":
The attempt to steelman the policy probably comes down to encouraging personal responsibility (the libertarian way). Forgiving debts without consequence promote a culture of non-payment, undermining the sustainability of school meal programs.
The steelmanned version of why lunches require payment is likely down to sustainability of the program in general (ie: school budgets are already stretched to the limit, so parent contributions are necessary).
Now, this could obviously be solved by just budgeting for the entire thing to be included in the overall taxes of the state, but then you've got to surpass the hurdle of tax raises being insanely difficult in the states.
Honestly, this exercise kind of makes me see (yet again) how broken the whole USAmerican system is. "I've got mine and I don't want to give any more away for something I don't need"
explodes · 8h ago
I really wish people would exercise more imagination while applying the adage.
A cafeteria worker is likely doing what they're told to do from the principal and board of education. They're doing what they're told because of laws that have been passed. At any point along this chain of human beings, someone could be relying on their job to keep one of them family members alive.
I know I'm throwing out a random scenario, and that doesn't make it true, but there IS a story here, and it is one that none of us will ever know. There are so many human things that happen that people attribute directly to malice, especially when they have very little information.
Anyways. Point is. I really have a hard time blaming any individual here (except perhaps lawmakers) no matter how depressing the whole fiasco is. It is simply another unfortunate consequence of rigid policies that have serious impact.
potato3732842 · 8h ago
>I really wish people would exercise more imagination while applying the adage.
It will never happen because additional analyzing would pretty quickly make it obvious that the problems are systemic and cannot be easily described by the kind of partisan quips and advocacy for "obvious" or "easy" solutions that dominate discussion of topics like this.
Basically any serious effort to understand and solve these problems precludes general audience participation and will therefore not be popular.
relaxing · 6h ago
I think everyone understands the lawmakers (and by extension the voters) are to blame.
wonderwonder · 8h ago
Have you started a local movement to pay for kids schools lunches?
If not, should we assume its due to malice as you know there is a problem and "don't do anything"?
mmastrac · 7h ago
I don't live in America, I just watch from the sidelines, sad at the state of the world's leader failing to be rational about most every social issue.
relaxing · 6h ago
Individually managed efforts doesn’t scale.
If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.
ToucanLoucan · 8h ago
There have been so many studies as to why... I mean basically the entire social safety net in the United States, back to front, doesn't work at all for any of it's stated goals, that anyone who still believes this is the way it should be run, just wants poor people to suffer. Or they're too lazy to read.
There is deep, culturally entrenched ideas here about how wealth is equated to goodness and righteousness, signs of $diety's blessings on you, etc. etc. and nobody, absolutely nobody is trying to unwind that. It's as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.
interactivecode · 8h ago
if feels like all too often malice is hidden behind the veil of incompetence.
r00fus · 2h ago
"any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
potato3732842 · 8h ago
>Because cruelty is the point for some people.
It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system. Though obviously people who personally are ok with or like that will be better represented in such a system.
> Or said in their parlance, it teaches you self reliance or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Rephrased another way you're basically saying "it's not my team doing that, it's the other team." And this is exactly the kind of divisive garbage that perpetuates the system.
What these systems teach in practice is "don't you dare step an inch out of line, no, intent doesn't matter, out of line is out of line and will be punished" which in a perverse way is exactly the kind of thing government schools will wind up teaching because every bit you make those future adults more likely to comply will pay dividends in reduced enforcement over their lives. Support for that sort of crap generally crosses party lines, as does opposition.
apercu · 8h ago
> It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system.
I'd argue that recent elections demonstrate enough of the people _are_ voting cruelty.
mschuster91 · 8h ago
> It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system.
The rules of the system are made by people. And yes, for quite some of them the cruelty is the point when making the rules.
ryandrake · 8h ago
That's right. "The system" didn't just appear out of nowhere. It's built by people--increasingly built by people who believe the government should be used as a tool to exact cruelty and humiliation on outgroups they don't like.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 8h ago
>I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free
What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?
SamBam · 8h ago
The cost of living isn't a single number. A state like Massachusetts, with a high cost of living for people with high income living in or near Boston, can also have large social services, like subsidized housing, good-quality public education, free healthcare, and free school lunches.
It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
runako · 8h ago
Georgia resident here.
Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.
mbfg · 8h ago
the cool thing about cost of living is taxes tend to track cost of living, so the ability for government to pay for school lunches is likely similar anywhere.
criddell · 8h ago
In Texas, schools are primarily funded through property taxes. That means wealthy neighborhoods have well funded schools that can easily afford free lunches, poor neighborhoods do not.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 7h ago
The thing I find more hilarious even than the -4 that my original comment got, is that I wasn't talking about taxes, but "cost of living". I was under the mistaken impression that the term refers to the cost of groceries, housing, fuel, utilities, and so forth, rather than taxes. But I must have touched a nerve. Guess they don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing.
No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.
thinkingtoilet · 7h ago
Why do you ask?
NoMoreNicksLeft · 6h ago
Because it's strange to call the lunches free, when it costs so much to live there. If I (for some reason) wanted to move to Massachusetts to live there for the rest of my life, you know, for those "free school lunches"... how much would those cost me? Turns out that it's alot. And it's magical thinking to suggest that for people already living there that the cost is zero, they're already paying that cost and have been for a long while. I can't prove it, but these free school lunches are probably really expensive.
thinkingtoilet · 6h ago
Do you think I that I think that the lunches magically appear and cost $0?
NoMoreNicksLeft · 5h ago
Do you use the word "free" to describe them? Do you use that word ("free") even to mean that the recipient of the lunch gets the lunch for no cost at all?
glitchc · 8h ago
Gradients would impose a significant burden on the bureaucracy. It's already complicated enough to figure out where a person's unique circumstances place them on various thresholds. Add gradients and the complexity grows exponentially. The net result would be a 100x increase in the number of public servants.
bombcar · 8h ago
Gradients can impose a burden, but they can also be simple enough to just "run with" - and many of them that are already gradient-based are.
They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.
_dark_matter_ · 8h ago
100x? I think this deserves a bit of a deeper insight. The inputs are the same, which means the verification steps are also exactly the same. The only change might be volume, but I highly doubt it would be 100x.
Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
lynndotpy · 8h ago
I don't think you should be getting downvoted, you are right. I don't think it's "100x more", but more complicated rules require more resources dedicated to their management.
It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.
The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.
interactivecode · 8h ago
why? income number input results in output number of support. or you know it could just be a of their part time income % with a fixed min and max. or something like a reverse income tax.
M3L0NM4N · 9h ago
Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
internetter · 8h ago
Without reading into lunch specifically, I'd very much be inclined to say yes.
The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on.
I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money.
One of the "don't say the quiet part out loud" with transit fares (which would NOT apply to school lunches) is that transit fares are a convenient way to remove unwanted transit enjoyers.
It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
dahart · 8h ago
Schools seem amazing at spending on lunches, when they can feed people for less than $5 a meal. I can’t eat for that amount, even when cooking at home these days. I’m not seeing clearly what your transit agency’s payment system upgrade has to do with school lunches or why that somehow supports the idea that they’re not spending prudently.
internetter · 7h ago
The question was asking if making them free actually saved the government money. I provided an anecdote suggesting that this might very well be the case, by providing an example of a place where the government is burning money in order to collect less money than they burned.
autobodie · 7h ago
Wrong. The question asked the opposite; it asked if the means testing saved the government money.
You answered "yes" in your original comment, but your supporting arguments imply "no" so I can see why people are confused.
Read the original question again:
>Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
internetter · 7h ago
Oh, that’s my bad
autobodie · 6h ago
I was going to be shocked if your case study actually found means testing worthwhile, so I read your entire comment, both others might not.
dahart · 7h ago
The specific problem is that the alternative in the case of school lunches does not involve upgrading the payment system. Just because transit might benefit in the short term from not upgrading doesn’t mean school lunches would.
TBH I’m a little skeptical of the payment system story, it sounds oversimplified and might be agenda driven. All our transit systems need payment system maintenance and upgrades over time. Riders want & demand tap to pay, for example. All costs cut into and balance against incomes, but that doesn’t mean they can opt out, nor that it will save taxpayers in the long run. Keeping the old payment system might have rising costs and lead to reduced ridership over time, costs which may not have been assumed in the story you shared. I doubt the payment system is very significant compared to train cars, rails, crossing lights & gates, employees, etc.
We tend to cherry-pick and arm-chair debate individual budget items without seeing the big picture, in order to justify the preconceived claim that governments are bad at spending. Making families pay for school lunches is pretty funny when taxpayers pay for the building, books, teachers, and janitorial and food staff, the sum of which is literally thousands of times more than lunch. Debating the funding of school lunches is missing the forest for the trees, right?
internetter · 7h ago
Hi, your last point makes me think that we’re in agreement that it’s not worth making students pay for lunch.
As for your other points, without annualizing it’s actually a fairly significant line item — their budget is about 3 billion. Annualized it’s not as bad, but that is hardly relevant as the fact of the matter is it costed 934 billion. Why did cost that much? My best answer is that a bid was held and cubic transportation systems won. This does not mean that the price was reasonable, only that cubic won. As for the new income, yes, that’s true. Trains will run slightly faster as people can board on many doors above ground (free system also does this). Ridership may increase thanks to tap to pay. I discuss this. But they also have, on numerous occasions, drastically overestimated the new revenue. Newer estimates show that the systems enable more fare evasion than before, cutting into profits.
My best guess as to why is mismanagement. After this was approved the MBTA’s management was overhauled for being a circus.
If you want to write a data driven counter argument, I would be more than happy to link to it at the top of my piece and offer rebuttals
freehorse · 6h ago
Maybe I am too sick right now to understand your comment, but isn't this an argument for actually making public transit free or sth? If merely upgrading the system costs 10 times the revenue? Isn't it what is actually argued about for school lunches?
beng-nl · 5h ago
Pardon my nitpick, but the “fair” -> “fare” typo is in this context more confusing than the average typo, so I thought I’d let you know :-)
mjevans · 8h ago
I suspect the only real benefit is a change in behavior of some passengers. They _paid_ for a thing and therefore feel more respectful towards it.
Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).
None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.
internetter · 7h ago
While I do not deny that this might very well be a problem, it feels fallacious on the part of the American public.
One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.
mjevans · 7h ago
We agree. Including to not respect things someone (indirectly) paid for through taxation. Part of the me-ism issue I called out in the larger post.
internetter · 7h ago
Yes, 100%. Another 'me-ism' I've been thinking a lot about recently is the collective unwillingness to ensure short term pain in exchange for long term prosperity, for instance in regard to climate policy. Likewise, there is no intuitive fix, especially when such prosperity will mostly extend to future generations.
The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report.
So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
dahart · 8h ago
So maybe $5M on a NY state education budget of nearly $40B, or less than two hundredths of one percent. Isn’t it weird that we pay for everything else but keep the food in a separate accounting budget?
klodolph · 7h ago
You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades.
If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
dahart · 7h ago
Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;)
I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
snarf21 · 8h ago
In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much more complicated thing to calculate and quantify.
klodolph · 7h ago
I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.
dsr_ · 9h ago
If you throw in the effects on school attendance and participation, yes.
Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024:
It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
Kapura · 8h ago
I feel like there's the administrative overhead, but also every child having food when they are learning is sure to be a profound positive externality. The only outcome of having kids to go to school hungry or receive substandard education is keeping the poorer classes of society "in their place." This is very gross.
piva00 · 7h ago
The issue is that the positive externality is really hard to measure, and penny-pinching policies only care about what is easily measured, it's just another instance of the McNamara fallacy.
As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.
There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.
Kapura · 7h ago
You shouldn't have to measure the fact that feeding children does good, and you should push back against anybody who thinks you should (because they clearly don't want all children to eat, a strong signal of fucked up morality).
This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody".
They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch.
I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
insane_dreamer · 50m ago
I would say yes. In our state all public school kids are eligible for free lunch by just signing up. What's the worst that can happen? Some parents who could afford lunch get it for free? I'd rather my tax dollars go to that than going to a whole bureaucracy designed to ensure that only those who "deserve" it get it.
As far as "rich people are getting free lunches!!!" argument. 1) rich people for the most part send their kids to private, not public schools. 2) rich people who can afford better lunches than the school lunch are going to send their kid to school with a lunch.
monkpit · 9h ago
Incentivized because it’s privatized
mproud · 8h ago
I love living in Minnesota.
Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago.
I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve.
I feel like this has already been discussed before one million times more than the simplicity of the issue should require.
Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or because of (perceived or not) social stigma. And while adults are considered responsible for their own lives, it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction. At the same time, providing free lunch to children at school solves/eases a lot of social, health and other issues all at once, for a cost that is basically peanuts compared to how impactful it can be.
labrador · 8h ago
My mother suffered severe post-partum depression when I was 7 so I got my 5 year old brother and I off to school most mornings in the 60's. Thankfully I grew up in California so we were never food shamed unlike some states that still think lunch debt is a moral failure.
rpcope1 · 8h ago
Surely it can't be that expensive to just provide every child living in our country that so desires/needs it three decent meals a day, regardless of their situation? That one has always confused me, if our country is actually prosperous and powerful, that something as simple as that seems like a given that would be embarrassing not to provide.
RankingMember · 7h ago
> something as simple as that seems like a given that would be embarrassing not to provide.
It's confusing (and embarrassing) because, in the grand scheme of government spending, it is something that could be (and should be) easily provided without any strings attached. If literal 10-year-old Richie Rich is dropped off at school in a helicopter, he should still be able to get a free lunch: that's how simple it should be. Adding means-testing of stuff like this is what cocks the whole thing up and makes it doubly expensive.
Apparently in 2022 the school lunch portion of the federal budget was $29 billion.
frakt0x90 · 7h ago
The price you pay at the kiosk is not the cost of production.
bombcar · 6h ago
Which is why I calculated an upper and lower bound. It's hard to argue it would be MORE expensive than McDonalds-for-all and hard to argue it would be much cheaper than a buck-o-meal.
andreicap · 8h ago
My poor country (Moldova) just implemented free lunches for kids in primary and middle schools.
What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?
boxed · 8h ago
Same reason they have expensive university, extremely expensive healthcare, for profit prisons, etc, I guess. There's a dog-eat-dog mentality over there which is quite puzzling to us Europeans.
compootr · 7h ago
> mentality
individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests
tarxvf · 8h ago
Because the US is really 50 small countries in a trenchcoat that aren't all on the same page of the script.
rdtsc · 8h ago
Very little at primary school level is controlled federally. It’s mostly state and school district based. That has both good and bad ramifications but it’s just how it is.
klodolph · 8h ago
If Moldova were a US state, it would be the 35th largest state, by population.
Most of these programs are done state-by-state in the US. Because the US is so large, it takes a large amount of political willpower to push programs out at the federal level. Education is mostly handled on a state-by-state basis. The funding split is around 90%/10%, with 90% handled by the state and 10% federal. (That may be changing.)
As a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to compare countries in Europe against individual states in the US, rather than comparing countries to countries.
healsdata · 8h ago
There's a significant number of people in the US who view any safety net as a handout and don't want others to get something for free that they themselves aren't getting.
llm_nerd · 7h ago
My rich country that is often accused of "socialism" (Canada) has no real lunch program at any school level. Kids pack and bring their own lunch, though a lot of high schools have a bespoke cafeteria where you can buy some fries or a burger, it operates more like a restaurant than a meal plan, and elementary/middle schools don't have kitchens at all.
With four kids I've made a lot of lunches over the years.
More recently schools have started "nutrition club" kind of things for kids that fall through the cracks, but it is mostly just things like nutrigrain bars or apples.
So it kind of varies.
I don't want any child to go hungry, but it is unfortunate that school meal programs usually seem to involve prison-style terrible food. I did see a program on Italian lunch programs and that stuff was just amazing.
pragmatic · 9h ago
“ families who qualify but don’t complete the paperwork for various reasons, ranging from language barriers to pride to bureaucratic overwhelm.”
Fear of legal action against them.
Giving all kids a hot meal is a no brainer eat win for society. We gave it to them, then took it back.
dataflow · 8h ago
I'm confused about the mechanics of the process here. Could someone explain how paying off the lunch debt translates to hot meals? I'm confused because the fact that a continuous debt -- however the amount -- means your expenses exceed your revenue. So even if you pay it off... doesn't that mean when doors open tomorrow, there'll be new debt, and thus the problem will still recur? Or is the idea that the debt was decreasing?
Edit: Fixed some misunderstanding in my comment.
bombcar · 8h ago
When you're a student you get a card or pin or something to identify you to the school cafeteria.
You have a balance it charges against. In theory, when it hits zero, no more food for you.
But that's impractical because kids are bad about just about everything, and so denying food because they forgot to remind their parents to recharge the thing is harsh. So the system lets them go into "debt" and still get a lunch.
And it doesn't really stop, but the school will often put up a bit of a fight over final grades or diploma to try to get the debt paid off, but often it just gets written off.
dataflow · 8h ago
Thank you! This clarifies a ton.
mindslight · 7h ago
Based on the article it seems like there is another level of enforcement here where once there is significant "debt", they take away the kid's hot lunch and give them a cold lunch instead. (and presumably this all happens at the cash register after the kid already has a hot plate of food in front of them)
maxlybbert · 8h ago
The federal government provides money to schools so that schools can provide low-cost food in their the cafeterias. The food provided has to meet nutritional standards ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp ). The federal government also sends some actual food to the schools ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/usda-fis ). Honestly, even with the subsidy and supplies, it’s hard to imagine how the schools provide much food.
Students from low income families can qualify for completely free lunch, and others can qualify for drastically reduced prices for lunch.
I don’t know if there are any federal requirements about how to handle students who forget or lose their lunch money, or students who normally bring their lunches to school but somehow forget or lose them. Most schools will have a specific policy, such as providing the food to the student and requesting the money later. The “debt” in question is between the school and the student, not between the school and its suppliers.
There is a relatively new policy (maybe ten years old) that schools with a large number of low income students can provide free breakfast and lunch to all students ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep ), so school lunch debt would be an issue in areas doing just a little better than that.
neolefty · 8h ago
It's not the school that's in debt, it's individual families who owe money to the lunch program.
But yeah, the problem you point out — families can go into debt again — is real, I think.
dataflow · 8h ago
Thanks for explaining. I somehow had my wires crossed and couldn't figure out what was going on. Updated the comment to address that.
phkahler · 8h ago
>> But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?
That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
em-bee · 8h ago
when i considered whether patching up the problem might be counterproductive i realized that the people who benefit from those payments and who might come to expect that the debt will be paid are not the people who would go out to fight for a solution anyways. the caterers are not going to lobby for a change, they'll just continue to refuse to feed children who haven't paid or they'll haunt the parents for payment because in their eyes it's the parents who are at fault. and those parents don't have any power or resources to change something either. they are busy making ends meet.
but patching up the problem involves new people. people who do have more resources and are thus actually capable of lobbying for change. and that's exactly what seems to happen.
also, a simple law change just to enforce that all children get the same food, whether it's paid or not, even without any funding moves the incentive for the caterers to lobby for more funding. so even that would be a win.
Smeevy · 7h ago
>[...] that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt.
The last few months are making me respond to that question with "so what?" I would rather that earnest efforts to reduce human misery accidentally benefit someone undeserving rather than to allow those problems to continually get worse.
Heck, I'm even ready for brand new unforeseen problems arising from those efforts. After decades of being lectured about the myriad slippery slopes that come with "too much" charity I'm ready try taking a slide down one or two for a change. We've been trying nothing for a long time and it doesn't seem to have much effect.
Please note that I'm absolutely not disagreeing with you and I apologize in advance if my tone comes across as strident.
hshdhdhj4444 · 7h ago
> It’s larger in that the entire structure of how we feed children at school is a tangle of federal programs, income thresholds, paperwork requirements, and local policies
If DOGE was anything other than an attempt to entrench executive control and execute performative cruelty, this is the stuff it would be tackling.
There are so many arbitrary conflicting policies that each only make things slightly less inefficient to the point where it doesn’t make sense to spend the energy fixing them, but put together they really add up to tangible and significant experiences in people’s lives.
An “all of the above” concentrated effort that looks at everything together, and then makes a list of suggestions to consolidate and harmonize policies that Congress can then pick through for the ones they agree upon on both sides of the aisle and pass quickly and unanimously would make a massive difference.
Sure, it may take a year instead of a few months to achieve this, but the changes would be beneficial, non destructive, and lasting, none of which can be said of even a generous perspective of what was actually done.
airstrike · 9h ago
This is the most poignant article I remember reading in recent years. Wow. Thank you for sharing.
giancarlostoro · 6h ago
I love stories like this one. It reminds me of my college years when I partook in a non-profit that was started by my aunt / uncle where we fed the homeless. I learned then that anyone can just step in and do something right in society, you don't have to waste hours, days, months, and years waiting for daddy government to do it.
dredmorbius · 5h ago
Yes and no.
The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
giancarlostoro · 2h ago
When you target local issues, and don't wait for the behemoth to get to it, I think you'll agree, that you can be drastically more effective. Now if we could get people to do this at scale as discrete orgs, maybe that would prevent some of the churn and issues we see when orgs get too big.
ItsBob · 8h ago
In The Peoples Republic of Scotland, all primary kids get free lunches now, I think (Primary is aged 4/5 to 11/12).
When it was introduced, my son was in P1 or 2. We spoke to the head and asked if we could pay for our son's lunch as we didn't need the freebie. She said there was no way to pay for it: it was free whether you wanted it or not.
Crazy.
I'm a rampant capitalist, every man for himself and all that but there is something about denying kids the fundamentals, like shelter, food etc. that rubs me up the wrong way. There should never be a situation where they are denied proper lunches. Never.
School lunch debt is an adult-designed problem that we shouldn't be passing onto kids.
bombcar · 8h ago
What I've seen which works decently well is an official policy of charging, and a policy of free for those in need, and then just cancelling or writing off the "debt" for those that didn't/couldn't pay.
One state's form of children's medicaid or whatever it is bills a "please pay this amount" each month, but the bill has a note that says "not paying this won't affect your coverage" and the coverage is granted not on whether you paid, but your financial situation. So the end result is the "bill" is actually an optional payment.
At least in the USA, if you ever think you were wrongly given a tax or other financial advantage, you can donate the largess back to the government: https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/23779454 (yay they take Venmo)
I couldn't find something directly for Scotland, and I know that assuming the UK is the same thing has caused spicy reactions before, but this does exist:
Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes? The article doesn't seem to be very clear on that... Is it that when the school's debt gets to a certain point, all kids' meals are replaced by "alternative meals"? Or do some kids' meals only get switched? If so what is the deciding criterion?
maxlybbert · 8h ago
I believe the current rules ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp ) require the schools to make some effort to avoid certain allergens.
When my children were in school, their school said that anybody who didn’t have lunch would be given a “sun butter” sandwich and food from the cafeteria. I wasn’t familiar with sun butter; it’s peanut butter made from sunflower seeds, because people allergic to peanuts may not be allergic to sunflower seeds.
stephencanon · 8h ago
Varies enormously between states and school districts.
In our public elementary school, there are two or three options each day: a hot meal of some sort, some days a hot vegetarian meal, and a salad bar that kids can choose what they want from (which usually includes some options that you wouldn't call "salad").
It's not fine dining, but the quality and variety is generally pretty decent. The kids have accounts, and parents are expected to refill a negative balance, but every kid gets the lunch of their choice regardless.
mbfg · 8h ago
Only kids who can't afford the "regular" meals get switched to alternative meals.
infecto · 9h ago
I can remember at least in High School that usually happens. None of it is healthy or good but you are allowed choice.
neolefty · 8h ago
> When the school's debt ...
It's not the school's debt, it's individual families. If they fall behind on lunch fees, their children have to eat cold meals.
> Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes?
Depends. US schools are run by the states, so it varies from place to place. As other commenters have said, some states just fund lunch so debt isn't an issue. I'm sure some accommodate dietary requirements & preferences more than others.
My experience was that if you have specific requirements that the school can't meet, you just bring your own lunch. If you're lucky enough to have organized parents.
klntsky · 8h ago
It always felt strange to me that although the US is clearly a guilt-driven culture, it has shame-based mechanics of control when it comes to finances. May it be due to protestant christianity losing its former position of influence? So that more archaic forms of human behavior control take precedence?
fred69 · 6h ago
Shame is the Protestant enforcement mechanism for guilt.
nobody9999 · 3h ago
>May it be due to protestant christianity losing its former position of influence?
Nope. At least not AFAICT. In fact, it seems to have a lot to do with the Prosperity Gospel[0] which, IIUC is a Protestant thing.
The primary tenets of that are (others please do correct me if I mis-state this) that if you are a devout servant of Christ, you will be rewarded with riches on this Earthly pale. If however, you are not sufficiently devout, you will not be rewarded.
As such, if you're rich, you're a decent, devout Christian. If you're not, you are insufficiently devout or just downright evil and, as such, you deserve your poverty.
I'm not sure what kind of car, but that's way above any car payment I've ever had to pay. ;)
m-hodges · 8h ago
I just popped over to Honda's website and clicked through on a new CR-V. I went with the EX trim which is the 2nd cheapest of six available trims. After clicking next on every screen without adding any upgrades, it offered me $33,745 MSRP with 36-month financing at 2.49% APR, which came to $1,035/month.
giancarlostoro · 8h ago
For 3 years? Yeah that makes sense, but if you do 40k (think SUV / upgraded mid-sized car) at 70 months, at 5% its in the 750 range a month, which is still not quite that high. I can't imagine most people do 3 year car loans.
criddell · 8h ago
According to this site [1], the average car payment is $724.
Interesting, I think so far I've only had used cars, but even so my wife has a newer car than I do, bought it brand new, and she's paying below that threshold so it surprised me to hear that amount.
SSJPython · 8h ago
Car payments have skyrocketed since the pandemic due to the massive increase in prices and the increase in interest rates.
searine · 8h ago
Childhood nutrition and Lead exposure are the two highest impact issues that can be easily solved to improve life-time outcomes, and yet we don't fix it.
It is mind boggling that we leave kids starving in america, and we are going to pay for it for decades.
infecto · 8h ago
Nit: could not stand the writing style. It took 3-4x more words than it should have.
On the topic I agree and believe strongly that all kids should receive free food at school. It amazes me people will fight to prevent when to me the costs are small but the benefit can be huge for the next generation.
anon84873628 · 8h ago
Because that's what makes it a "story" people will remember, rather than just a few more sad statistics about our society that people will see and then forget.
infecto · 8h ago
Disagree. The story rambled forever. The substance was good but it fits into a few paragraphs, the rest was word filler imo.
alwa · 8h ago
It frustrates me when advocates get righteous about something that they only imagine and don’t take the time to see for themselves (while claiming it’s widespread and easy to observe):
“I never actually witnessed this scene myself, but I’ve interviewed enough lunch ladies, principals and kids to construct a sort of composite mental image that now plays on an endless loop between my ears. It’s become my own personal film of educational injustice, frame by frame, in high-definition slow motion: the momentary confusion on the child’s face, the hushed explanation from the cashier, the sudden understanding dawning in the kid’s eyes, the burning shame that follows.”
And from that, cooking up an opening paragraph precipitated on “witnessing” it, and Nuremberg-like somber intonations about the banality of “the ritual humiliation of second graders. It’s watching the adults in the room — ordinary, decent people who’d never dream of snatching food from a child in any other context — perform this strange ceremony with the mechanical resignation of DMV employees, while around them life continues uninterrupted, because this is just How Things Are.”
==
He didn’t witness this. He talked to people who were heartsick about it happening at all. Even in his imagined example, the kid doesn’t go hungry, the kid gets a sandwich instead of an institutional pizza slice.
The adults I remember from situations like this would absolutely go out of their way to treat kids with dignity—I remember foodservice workers seeking out any kids who still looked hungry to slip them leftover hot food from the line, and in some cases workers or counselors or teachers covering kids’ meals themselves.
Dunning lunch debt is probably a silly way to run a program, but there’s no honest policy assessment here. I don’t see why school lunch shouldn’t be free at the point of service, but I also don’t know why it isn’t under the status quo. I bet it’s not raw sadism. The pearl-clutching seems to focus on behaviors that are unsubstantiated at best.
em-bee · 7h ago
he talked to kids. how many kids to you have to talk to before you can make a picture? maybe the kids didn't get hungry, but if they tell you they felt humiliated, then that is what happened. the kid still knows. the other kids know. it doesn't matter if people went out of their way to avoid that. it doesn't matter that the story given is just an anecdote. teachers covering for kids are anecdotes too.
you can be the most courteous about helping a kid out, and it may be that in many cases that avoids humiliation, but in some it doesn't. and that's enough to make that picture.
and don't think that people working in schools can't be humiliating. i have had to experience it at least once myself. not because of lunch money but something else, but that's besides the point.
also how exactly are they supposed to see for themselves? it's not like they can just walk into a school and hang out during lunch until they see it happen.
bombcar · 7h ago
It's good to remember that AI isn't the only thing that hallucinates scenarios.
dredmorbius · 1d ago
NB: Title from HTML source due to clickbait. The story stands on its own without such tactics.
neilv · 7h ago
Where I went to grade school, I don't recall a peanut butter sandwich option. If you didn't bring a bagged lunch, and you wanted to eat lunch, you had to spend your recess time washing trays. Which I did sometimes.
Sometimes, adults want children to go through the same "character building" rituals that they did. For example, working some kind of job, to supposedly teach values about hard work and responsibility.
Other times, adults don't want to subject kids to "character building" that they went through. For example, enduring bullying. Or working a crappy job, while their schoolmates played sports, socialized, did extracurriculars, or got a decent night's sleep.
On this one, my opinion is: Just feed the children already. Stop stomping them harder with class inequality, and conditioning them to accept that as normal, from a young age. I'd rather have children be raised to reject class inequality -- as unfair, greedy, cruel, and dumb. And more immediately, I want children to be fed, and to get other basic care.
mixmastamyk · 6h ago
One thing I don’t like about the free lunch but never mentioned is that it is by necessity very cheap food, and that means carbage.
Try getting a kid to eat vegetables when processed bread products are being handed out at school. Healthy eating pretty much stopped that year. Which is a shame because it’s not expensive.
senectus1 · 8h ago
(I'm in Australia) I dont understand why this concept of schools providing lunches ever became a thing...
Why did this idea ever take off?
icegreentea2 · 8h ago
School lunch programs across the world get setup and perpetuated for a variety of reasons. They also have a variety of funding models.
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
dredmorbius · 5h ago
I'd looked up and read a few articles on the topic whilst AFK after reading GP comment above.
And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]
icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.
The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).
The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>
bombcar · 7h ago
The US has discovered that there's a substantial portion of the population (which for this could be 1%, 10%, 20% whatever) who is really bad at raising kids, basically. If the school doesn't provide lunch, the kids would simply not eat any lunch. So they provide lunches, because it's easier than handling the fallout from some kids not eating, etc.
As a child I never had "provided lunch" but I also went to private school; we didn't even have any option through elementary (grade 8, about 12). High school had a greasy burger joint (think: high school football game concession stand) but that was it.
Providing lunches involves enough work that providing breakfast, too isn't much more expensive.
(The programs may have started for other reasons but the above is usually why they continue. It's also hard to stop doing something like "provide kids food" once you start.)
pjc50 · 8h ago
Nutrition is an important precursor to education. It saves time and effort of the parents providing individual lunches, as well as guaranteeing a certain minimum level. There's always a few kids whose education is impacted because they're not well fed, due to poverty or chaos at home.
triceratops · 8h ago
If the government forces you to be someplace, under threat of imprisonment for your parents, then they'd better at least feed you.
em-bee · 7h ago
at what time do kids in australia come home from school? for comparison in germany the average school day is 4-6 hours, depending on age. in the US it is 6-8 hours. in germany kids usually come home for lunch. in the US they usually don't. those two hours make a big difference in what kind of food the kids need to bring to school. in germany a snack is enough. that's easy for parents to accomplish. kids in the US need a real meal for their lunch break in school. but cooking food in the morning that kids can carry and eat 5 hours later? even wealthy parents don't have time for that.
neolefty · 8h ago
Do you mean you always have to bring your lunch to school with you, in Australia?
I went to a weird high school in the US where that was the case. They just didn't have a lunch room, so everybody sat in the hallways at lunch time. But yeah, all the other schools I've heard of provide lunch. Most offer breakfast as well, as an option.
cpursley · 8h ago
That's very kind. Now if we can start getting some real food into American school instead of SNAP Slop. If France and South Korea can manage it, we can as well.
wonderwonder · 8h ago
Pretty depressing.
I'm pretty right wing but kids should always be taken care of.
I'll happily pay more in property tax to cover school lunches and kids medical.
em-bee · 6h ago
property taxes go to schools in your own area. would you also support that taxes be redistributed to other areas that don't have enough tax income and where people can't afford higher taxes? because as i see it, that is the real problem in the way schools in the US are funded. (i am hoping/assuming your answer is yes, but i think the distinction is important and needs to be pointed out)
The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here that are suffering. I have a brother with disabilities and there are "lines" drawn all the time with funding that are either all or nothing. If you cross a line, you lose funding. It encourages them to work less, save less money, and be more reliant on state funding. Why haven't we figured out gradients yet? For example, above this line you get 90% of costs covered. Above this line 80%. Above this line 70%. etc... etc... etc...
It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth).
This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system.
There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)
TFA describes the first circumstance.
Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:
Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>).
Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...>
Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.
I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).
I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:
- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.
- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.
Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.
I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.
* Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window)
* Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable
* No system of reservation to try to forecast load
There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.
Which is how some parts of US taxation works, but not other parts. You seem to be in one part, and unaware of the rest. (And is a mix of taxation and other "eligibility" issues, with poorly advertised massive cliffs here and there for extra helpfulness).
The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.
Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free.
Most people like receiving a big fat refund.
Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.
Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.
Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
Often you have a program created, with "free below X, sliding scale until no subsidy at Y" - done right, this is "perfect" in that each marginal dollar is lightly "taxed" (losing a subsidy is the same as a tax, from the worker's perspective).
This is great! Though let's say (theoretically) that the end result is a 1% "tax" for our family, so each dollar they increase income costs them a penny of subsidy. They probably have other subsidies besides school lunches, like WIC, or ACA, or whatever. Those are also sliding down at various amounts, which can cause it to start to get annoying. But it works.
Then the program is expanded, to be "nice" - even nicer! Now the subsidy is 100% below X, but they're going to also cover 100% up to Y! That's great! Everyone is better off now ... except now you have the situation where at Y + 1, you earned one more dollar, but lost potentially thousands in subsidy. This is NOT ACTUALLY WORSE than before, because at Y + 1 in both scenarios you have no subsidy, but it hurts much more in the second because the subsidy wasn't slowly being drained.
The real answer is that gradients are hard, and clear lines are easy. A shocking number of Americans don't understand how our income tax brackets work; they believe that if you cross the line into a higher income bracket, your entire income is taxed at that new, higher rate, and you end up losing money overall.
Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.
People like the ones I described exist in both parties but I think it’s telling that people assumed I’m talking about one political party because it made those slogans it’s brand. The hard lines vs gradient doesn’t make sense in terms of public because this doesn’t raise to the level of public discourse.
Also Massachusetts is a bad example because they enacted free lunches across the board. They may have gradient issues in other welfare programs but school lunches is something they’ve solved for now.
As for RCV being shot down, I don’t think it’s an education issue. I personally prefer approval voting as it’s simpler to explain and faster results. Not wanting to switch to RCV (specifically IRV) can have all sorts of reasons and claiming it’s because the electorate is dumb is the wrong take I think.
That's the ostensible reason - the reality is that Blue MAGA also really hates power challenges. Look no further than CA where they also shot down (even the possibility for local elections to consider) ranked choice voting.
The math wasn't "hard" - it was wrong. The decision process was to be instant runoff voting, which has significant problems. IRV is basically what people stuck in the two party mindset think they want so they can express support for a third party. But once a third party gains enough traction to become viable, perverse incentives (strategic voting) shows right back up again. What we really need is Ranked Choice ballots with Ranked Pairs decision process. This satisfies Condorcet which means that a winner is preferred by the majority of voters.
These people hold the mindset that if you are not disabled and don't have any learning disabilities, you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
There isn't any room for nuance with them, they will just call people who are neurodivergent "lazy" and "welfare queens".
The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.
Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).
https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn...
If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.
That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.
What are the good faith arguments in favor of this?
- ignorance
- lack of critical reasoning skills
- religion
- sadism
- ?
I do have trouble finding good faith arguments in favor of this policy. It is cruel. But the people who decided to implement it aren't "other". They're humans who think they're good people (aside from a small minority of people who really don't care) and much as we'd like to think so we're not that different than them. If we can understand their justification, that's a step toward actually convincing them there is another way. And yes, I have changed many people's viewpoints with this level of patience, not everyone is too stupid/mean/insult of your choice to change their minds.
it's the continuous assumption of malice that prevents people from listening to each other. and that is still the case even if there is actual malice. almost by definition, if you do not present the assumption for good will to the other side, they will have difficulty attributing good will to you, no matter whether they themselves are acting are maliciously or not.
The people who decided to implement the policy believe that cruelty will create deterrence.
Persisting in this line of thinking despite centuries of cruelty and no end to the undesired behavior is what leads to sayings like “the cruelty is the point.” Psychologically, it’s well understood there are those who really get a kick out of making people suffer.
The attempt to steelman the policy probably comes down to encouraging personal responsibility (the libertarian way). Forgiving debts without consequence promote a culture of non-payment, undermining the sustainability of school meal programs.
The steelmanned version of why lunches require payment is likely down to sustainability of the program in general (ie: school budgets are already stretched to the limit, so parent contributions are necessary).
Now, this could obviously be solved by just budgeting for the entire thing to be included in the overall taxes of the state, but then you've got to surpass the hurdle of tax raises being insanely difficult in the states.
Honestly, this exercise kind of makes me see (yet again) how broken the whole USAmerican system is. "I've got mine and I don't want to give any more away for something I don't need"
A cafeteria worker is likely doing what they're told to do from the principal and board of education. They're doing what they're told because of laws that have been passed. At any point along this chain of human beings, someone could be relying on their job to keep one of them family members alive.
I know I'm throwing out a random scenario, and that doesn't make it true, but there IS a story here, and it is one that none of us will ever know. There are so many human things that happen that people attribute directly to malice, especially when they have very little information.
Anyways. Point is. I really have a hard time blaming any individual here (except perhaps lawmakers) no matter how depressing the whole fiasco is. It is simply another unfortunate consequence of rigid policies that have serious impact.
It will never happen because additional analyzing would pretty quickly make it obvious that the problems are systemic and cannot be easily described by the kind of partisan quips and advocacy for "obvious" or "easy" solutions that dominate discussion of topics like this.
Basically any serious effort to understand and solve these problems precludes general audience participation and will therefore not be popular.
If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.
There is deep, culturally entrenched ideas here about how wealth is equated to goodness and righteousness, signs of $diety's blessings on you, etc. etc. and nobody, absolutely nobody is trying to unwind that. It's as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.
It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system. Though obviously people who personally are ok with or like that will be better represented in such a system.
> Or said in their parlance, it teaches you self reliance or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Rephrased another way you're basically saying "it's not my team doing that, it's the other team." And this is exactly the kind of divisive garbage that perpetuates the system.
What these systems teach in practice is "don't you dare step an inch out of line, no, intent doesn't matter, out of line is out of line and will be punished" which in a perverse way is exactly the kind of thing government schools will wind up teaching because every bit you make those future adults more likely to comply will pay dividends in reduced enforcement over their lives. Support for that sort of crap generally crosses party lines, as does opposition.
I'd argue that recent elections demonstrate enough of the people _are_ voting cruelty.
The rules of the system are made by people. And yes, for quite some of them the cruelty is the point when making the rules.
What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?
It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.
No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.
They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.
Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.
The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.
The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on.
I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money.
https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
You answered "yes" in your original comment, but your supporting arguments imply "no" so I can see why people are confused.
Read the original question again:
>Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
TBH I’m a little skeptical of the payment system story, it sounds oversimplified and might be agenda driven. All our transit systems need payment system maintenance and upgrades over time. Riders want & demand tap to pay, for example. All costs cut into and balance against incomes, but that doesn’t mean they can opt out, nor that it will save taxpayers in the long run. Keeping the old payment system might have rising costs and lead to reduced ridership over time, costs which may not have been assumed in the story you shared. I doubt the payment system is very significant compared to train cars, rails, crossing lights & gates, employees, etc.
We tend to cherry-pick and arm-chair debate individual budget items without seeing the big picture, in order to justify the preconceived claim that governments are bad at spending. Making families pay for school lunches is pretty funny when taxpayers pay for the building, books, teachers, and janitorial and food staff, the sum of which is literally thousands of times more than lunch. Debating the funding of school lunches is missing the forest for the trees, right?
As for your other points, without annualizing it’s actually a fairly significant line item — their budget is about 3 billion. Annualized it’s not as bad, but that is hardly relevant as the fact of the matter is it costed 934 billion. Why did cost that much? My best answer is that a bid was held and cubic transportation systems won. This does not mean that the price was reasonable, only that cubic won. As for the new income, yes, that’s true. Trains will run slightly faster as people can board on many doors above ground (free system also does this). Ridership may increase thanks to tap to pay. I discuss this. But they also have, on numerous occasions, drastically overestimated the new revenue. Newer estimates show that the systems enable more fare evasion than before, cutting into profits.
My best guess as to why is mismanagement. After this was approved the MBTA’s management was overhauled for being a circus.
If you want to write a data driven counter argument, I would be more than happy to link to it at the top of my piece and offer rebuttals
Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).
None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.
One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
Such is the tragedy of the commons.
https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost...
The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report.
So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024:
https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070...
It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.
There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.
This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody".
They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch.
It is a USDA program: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep
I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
As far as "rich people are getting free lunches!!!" argument. 1) rich people for the most part send their kids to private, not public schools. 2) rich people who can afford better lunches than the school lunch are going to send their kid to school with a lunch.
Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago.
I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve.
[^1] https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/FNS/SNP/free/
Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or because of (perceived or not) social stigma. And while adults are considered responsible for their own lives, it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction. At the same time, providing free lunch to children at school solves/eases a lot of social, health and other issues all at once, for a cost that is basically peanuts compared to how impactful it can be.
It's confusing (and embarrassing) because, in the grand scheme of government spending, it is something that could be (and should be) easily provided without any strings attached. If literal 10-year-old Richie Rich is dropped off at school in a helicopter, he should still be able to get a free lunch: that's how simple it should be. Adding means-testing of stuff like this is what cocks the whole thing up and makes it doubly expensive.
It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5.
https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp says there are 71 million kids.
$466 billion a year.
Ok, ok, that is maybe too high. Let's assume a wonderful world where you can produce a meal for a dollar (less than the local school district).
$77 billion a year.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/370341...
What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?
individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests
Most of these programs are done state-by-state in the US. Because the US is so large, it takes a large amount of political willpower to push programs out at the federal level. Education is mostly handled on a state-by-state basis. The funding split is around 90%/10%, with 90% handled by the state and 10% federal. (That may be changing.)
As a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to compare countries in Europe against individual states in the US, rather than comparing countries to countries.
With four kids I've made a lot of lunches over the years.
More recently schools have started "nutrition club" kind of things for kids that fall through the cracks, but it is mostly just things like nutrigrain bars or apples.
So it kind of varies.
I don't want any child to go hungry, but it is unfortunate that school meal programs usually seem to involve prison-style terrible food. I did see a program on Italian lunch programs and that stuff was just amazing.
Fear of legal action against them.
Giving all kids a hot meal is a no brainer eat win for society. We gave it to them, then took it back.
Edit: Fixed some misunderstanding in my comment.
You have a balance it charges against. In theory, when it hits zero, no more food for you.
But that's impractical because kids are bad about just about everything, and so denying food because they forgot to remind their parents to recharge the thing is harsh. So the system lets them go into "debt" and still get a lunch.
And it doesn't really stop, but the school will often put up a bit of a fight over final grades or diploma to try to get the debt paid off, but often it just gets written off.
Students from low income families can qualify for completely free lunch, and others can qualify for drastically reduced prices for lunch.
I don’t know if there are any federal requirements about how to handle students who forget or lose their lunch money, or students who normally bring their lunches to school but somehow forget or lose them. Most schools will have a specific policy, such as providing the food to the student and requesting the money later. The “debt” in question is between the school and the student, not between the school and its suppliers.
There is a relatively new policy (maybe ten years old) that schools with a large number of low income students can provide free breakfast and lunch to all students ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep ), so school lunch debt would be an issue in areas doing just a little better than that.
But yeah, the problem you point out — families can go into debt again — is real, I think.
That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
but patching up the problem involves new people. people who do have more resources and are thus actually capable of lobbying for change. and that's exactly what seems to happen.
also, a simple law change just to enforce that all children get the same food, whether it's paid or not, even without any funding moves the incentive for the caterers to lobby for more funding. so even that would be a win.
Heck, I'm even ready for brand new unforeseen problems arising from those efforts. After decades of being lectured about the myriad slippery slopes that come with "too much" charity I'm ready try taking a slide down one or two for a change. We've been trying nothing for a long time and it doesn't seem to have much effect.
Please note that I'm absolutely not disagreeing with you and I apologize in advance if my tone comes across as strident.
If DOGE was anything other than an attempt to entrench executive control and execute performative cruelty, this is the stuff it would be tackling.
There are so many arbitrary conflicting policies that each only make things slightly less inefficient to the point where it doesn’t make sense to spend the energy fixing them, but put together they really add up to tangible and significant experiences in people’s lives.
An “all of the above” concentrated effort that looks at everything together, and then makes a list of suggestions to consolidate and harmonize policies that Congress can then pick through for the ones they agree upon on both sides of the aisle and pass quickly and unanimously would make a massive difference.
Sure, it may take a year instead of a few months to achieve this, but the changes would be beneficial, non destructive, and lasting, none of which can be said of even a generous perspective of what was actually done.
The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
<https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/gates-foundation-i...>
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
<https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiny-spark/id505053432>
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
When it was introduced, my son was in P1 or 2. We spoke to the head and asked if we could pay for our son's lunch as we didn't need the freebie. She said there was no way to pay for it: it was free whether you wanted it or not.
Crazy.
I'm a rampant capitalist, every man for himself and all that but there is something about denying kids the fundamentals, like shelter, food etc. that rubs me up the wrong way. There should never be a situation where they are denied proper lunches. Never.
School lunch debt is an adult-designed problem that we shouldn't be passing onto kids.
One state's form of children's medicaid or whatever it is bills a "please pay this amount" each month, but the bill has a note that says "not paying this won't affect your coverage" and the coverage is granted not on whether you paid, but your financial situation. So the end result is the "bill" is actually an optional payment.
At least in the USA, if you ever think you were wrongly given a tax or other financial advantage, you can donate the largess back to the government: https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/23779454 (yay they take Venmo)
I couldn't find something directly for Scotland, and I know that assuming the UK is the same thing has caused spicy reactions before, but this does exist:
https://www.dmo.gov.uk/responsibilities/public-sector-funds-...
When my children were in school, their school said that anybody who didn’t have lunch would be given a “sun butter” sandwich and food from the cafeteria. I wasn’t familiar with sun butter; it’s peanut butter made from sunflower seeds, because people allergic to peanuts may not be allergic to sunflower seeds.
In our public elementary school, there are two or three options each day: a hot meal of some sort, some days a hot vegetarian meal, and a salad bar that kids can choose what they want from (which usually includes some options that you wouldn't call "salad").
It's not fine dining, but the quality and variety is generally pretty decent. The kids have accounts, and parents are expected to refill a negative balance, but every kid gets the lunch of their choice regardless.
It's not the school's debt, it's individual families. If they fall behind on lunch fees, their children have to eat cold meals.
> Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes?
Depends. US schools are run by the states, so it varies from place to place. As other commenters have said, some states just fund lunch so debt isn't an issue. I'm sure some accommodate dietary requirements & preferences more than others.
My experience was that if you have specific requirements that the school can't meet, you just bring your own lunch. If you're lucky enough to have organized parents.
Nope. At least not AFAICT. In fact, it seems to have a lot to do with the Prosperity Gospel[0] which, IIUC is a Protestant thing.
The primary tenets of that are (others please do correct me if I mis-state this) that if you are a devout servant of Christ, you will be rewarded with riches on this Earthly pale. If however, you are not sufficiently devout, you will not be rewarded.
As such, if you're rich, you're a decent, devout Christian. If you're not, you are insufficiently devout or just downright evil and, as such, you deserve your poverty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
> ...
> It was less than some monthly car payments.
I'm not sure what kind of car, but that's way above any car payment I've ever had to pay. ;)
[1]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/#:~:text=Th...
It is mind boggling that we leave kids starving in america, and we are going to pay for it for decades.
On the topic I agree and believe strongly that all kids should receive free food at school. It amazes me people will fight to prevent when to me the costs are small but the benefit can be huge for the next generation.
“I never actually witnessed this scene myself, but I’ve interviewed enough lunch ladies, principals and kids to construct a sort of composite mental image that now plays on an endless loop between my ears. It’s become my own personal film of educational injustice, frame by frame, in high-definition slow motion: the momentary confusion on the child’s face, the hushed explanation from the cashier, the sudden understanding dawning in the kid’s eyes, the burning shame that follows.”
And from that, cooking up an opening paragraph precipitated on “witnessing” it, and Nuremberg-like somber intonations about the banality of “the ritual humiliation of second graders. It’s watching the adults in the room — ordinary, decent people who’d never dream of snatching food from a child in any other context — perform this strange ceremony with the mechanical resignation of DMV employees, while around them life continues uninterrupted, because this is just How Things Are.”
==
He didn’t witness this. He talked to people who were heartsick about it happening at all. Even in his imagined example, the kid doesn’t go hungry, the kid gets a sandwich instead of an institutional pizza slice.
The adults I remember from situations like this would absolutely go out of their way to treat kids with dignity—I remember foodservice workers seeking out any kids who still looked hungry to slip them leftover hot food from the line, and in some cases workers or counselors or teachers covering kids’ meals themselves.
Dunning lunch debt is probably a silly way to run a program, but there’s no honest policy assessment here. I don’t see why school lunch shouldn’t be free at the point of service, but I also don’t know why it isn’t under the status quo. I bet it’s not raw sadism. The pearl-clutching seems to focus on behaviors that are unsubstantiated at best.
you can be the most courteous about helping a kid out, and it may be that in many cases that avoids humiliation, but in some it doesn't. and that's enough to make that picture.
and don't think that people working in schools can't be humiliating. i have had to experience it at least once myself. not because of lunch money but something else, but that's besides the point.
also how exactly are they supposed to see for themselves? it's not like they can just walk into a school and hang out during lunch until they see it happen.
Sometimes, adults want children to go through the same "character building" rituals that they did. For example, working some kind of job, to supposedly teach values about hard work and responsibility.
Other times, adults don't want to subject kids to "character building" that they went through. For example, enduring bullying. Or working a crappy job, while their schoolmates played sports, socialized, did extracurriculars, or got a decent night's sleep.
On this one, my opinion is: Just feed the children already. Stop stomping them harder with class inequality, and conditioning them to accept that as normal, from a young age. I'd rather have children be raised to reject class inequality -- as unfair, greedy, cruel, and dumb. And more immediately, I want children to be fed, and to get other basic care.
Try getting a kid to eat vegetables when processed bread products are being handed out at school. Healthy eating pretty much stopped that year. Which is a shame because it’s not expensive.
Why did this idea ever take off?
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
Among those:
TIME Magazine, "School Lunch in America: An Abbreviated History" <https://time.com/4496771/school-lunch-history/>
Wikipedia, "School meal programs in the United States" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_meal_programs_in_the_Un...>
PBS, "The History of School Lunch" <https://www.pbs.org/food/stories/history-school-lunch>
And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]
icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.
The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).
The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>
As a child I never had "provided lunch" but I also went to private school; we didn't even have any option through elementary (grade 8, about 12). High school had a greasy burger joint (think: high school football game concession stand) but that was it.
Providing lunches involves enough work that providing breakfast, too isn't much more expensive.
(The programs may have started for other reasons but the above is usually why they continue. It's also hard to stop doing something like "provide kids food" once you start.)
I went to a weird high school in the US where that was the case. They just didn't have a lunch room, so everybody sat in the hallways at lunch time. But yeah, all the other schools I've heard of provide lunch. Most offer breakfast as well, as an option.