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?
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.
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.
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?
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 %.
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.
I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%.
> 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?
You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less.
These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015.
I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.
The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.
I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
I agree with you that the cost of lunch food adds up and is more than the cost of accounting. Substantial is a subjective word but true if looking at the number by itself, and feeding 2 million kids in NY state will obviously be a big number compared to most people’s salaries, which is why it seems substantial. But it’s still a small fraction of the cost of education, and food is a single line item in a much much bigger budget. We can’t actually separate the lunch costs, when you include the cafeteria. It seems very strange that we don’t ask families to pay for books or bus rides but do ask them to pay for lunch. It very much feels like a conscious choice to ensure the poor kids are identified.
There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.
The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.
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.
the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/
It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead).
While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.
In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.
This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.
No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.
In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
> Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.
Are you disagreeing with me, or just reframing the discussion? Pick one mode of discussion, please, I find it hard to follow if you start off disagreeing but then switch gears and decide to reframe the discussion.
I encourage you to speak as much as you want about the fact that our accounting system sucks at dealing with externalities. However, we are still slaves to accounting, somewhat. Nobody rational expects a fridge to be a profit source. But if you take taxes, people expect an accounting of how the taxes are spent. “This program costs money but has benefits that outweigh the cost” is pretty easy to understand. The program doesn’t pay for itself because we don’t have a way to put better outcomes on the books.
We also don’t have an accounting system that lets me show a net positive for buying a movie ticket.
That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
At some point we have to face the truth that the only well organized and ran country in the world is Singapore. European governments had barely any right influence and they manage to evolve their own disfunction quite well. It seems that for some reasons the states after WWII just lost their capacity to build things. If you watch Oppenheimer - one of the things in the background is how staggeringly competent were the administrative guys. There is no such things now. Any government project both big and small is expected to be cost overrun, delayed and if ever finished is a cointoss if it will make things better or worse. It is a global malaise.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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".
Even before the bots, I remember MvM being unplayable if you weren't with enough friends to make votekick impossible (and that wouldn't stop them from trying, but they'd ragequit themselves when no one votes yes, and leave you down a player).
A solution that I have seen implemented and discussed is a flat, very low fare. High enough to keep people off public transit that are disrespectful of it, but low enough to allow almost anyone to take it thus increasing ridership. An added bonus is when using a transit card to tap on and off, the statistics of ridership are still readily available for governments to better plan infrastructure.
If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.
Here in Queensland we just paid $400 million for a ticketing system that is now used entirely for 50c tickets. The marketing line is that the fee is necessary for analytics, but the cynic in me says that it's probably a combination of secret contract negotiations with a pay-per-tap component, and sunk cost fallacy.
I've not been in a place with a functional transit system where fares were high enough to prevent disruptive people from boarding. I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
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?
Did you mean no? The question was about whether the bureaucracy was worth it and you said yes, then show an example where bureaucracy is not justified.
> but our governments are awful at spending our money.
No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.
Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.
LA is upgrading its fare collection systems because the alternative is for the rail cars to become homeless hotels.
Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.
In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.
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 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.
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.
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 so much. My HCOL area uses a hybrid approach: kids can always eat regardless and can run up huge $$$ tabs. The parents get pestered once it gets over a few hundred.
I absolutely agree, I cannot comprehend why there's even a discussion in the USA for not providing free hot meals for students. Running tabs, pestering parents, all of that sounds absurd for a very simple moral answer: yes, kids should have access to food in schools, no matter their wealth status. I don't even care about richer parents getting free food for their kids at school, all kids should be treated the same.
> 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.
This is an understatement. Florida's unemployment system for example was designed intentionally to fail when too many people tried to file for benefits to prevent them from having to pay out. This of course blew up into a whole scandal during covid when a bunch of people were suddenly unemployed and all tried filing at the same time which is how it officially came out that the system was designed from the start to function like this.
To make it worse, I believe that there have been incidences where people have tried to do similar (pay off school lunch debt) and the School District has refused, citing reasons from "processing overhead" to "privacy".
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.
The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten".
The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.
>The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.
This, food waste is built into the system. It'd be nice if it wasn't but every restaurant and cafeteria throws away just as much food as they sell, most people just don't realize it because they've never worked in food service.
>The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in.
The waste is just a necessary component even in for profit systems. It's still better to feed everyone than to not. Even if the only thing you are allowed to do is to give to students, then you send them home with several meals worth to use up the leftovers.
This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever.
Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.
No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.
I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
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.
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 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?).
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.
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.
This is a morally correct and minimum acceptable response. Leagues must admit they were wrong (probably impossible), and mail out letters and trophies (trivial).
These governing bodies need to Do Better. They need to work on themselves.
If you put a man into a game of finding the best person out of 10,000 women, you're going to find the man at the championship. This isn't a per capita or population scale thing. Competitions are intensely personal games.
Sports are a big part of American culture and smugly ruining them with nonsense makes Americans mad. This is not difficult to understand.
Testosterone levels fluctuate more on a minute by minute scale with such activities rather than a day by day scale. We should ban exogenous testosterone use, and we already do.
Men and women are not the same. They are a distinct, binary grouping. One cannot measure up to the metrics, characteristics, etc of the other. Women have their own sports leagues because of this. Men do not have exclusive leagues, its illegal in most western countries anyway under discrimination laws. Women just cant compete at these levels though. Thats not a moral judgement but a plain reading of the facts.
As far as the incoming remark about "controlling what high school students do in private with each other", I will rather present you with a question:
Should we make it impossible for thousands of girls to get a gold medal, XOR allow 1 person, born a male and currently pretending/presenting as a woman, to dominate the competition? This is the actual, real life decision that leagues of all kinds must make, from football to chess.
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.
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?”
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.
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".
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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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"?
> If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.
On the contrary. Many people favor individually managed efforts because they disagree with your premise, and believe that such efforts scale better than centrally managed ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can reapply whenever your income changes (and generally you are obligated to report such). At least in my state, the system to do so is mostly automated, although they do have a caseworker manually review such things. A good deal of people who receive government benefits aren't filing taxes at all, and they qualify for programs based on other proof, like a pay stub.
I think steep gradients are OK, as long as they are not over 100%. When someone is working and earning very little, they need all the help they can get. As they earn more, they need less help, and should start to shift to instead contributing to helping others. There is probably some ideal "ramp" that provides the right set of incentives. I think 75% is probably too high.
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.
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.
That's not tax brackets though, that's income. Talking about tax brackets is weirdly indirect way to talk about income. The people who avoid raises because they think they'll be taxed higher on all their income because they don't understand how brackets work aren't the same people who avoid raises because it'll cause them to earn too much to be eligible for government assistance programs.
There may be some cases--if a person is on the edge of being eligible for SNAP, or for SSDI for a dependent adult in their houshold, where getting a raise might actually make them poorer. It's wrong to say people do this because they're too stupid to know about marginal tax rates.
My state fixed this so the marginal rate was never over 100%, but there is a rather wide range where the marginal rate is about 75%. For every dollar you earn, you keep 25¢, and are paying in 75¢ in the form of getting fewer refundable tax credits, food stamps, energy bill assistance, and so on. (If I include the energy bill assistance, the marginal rate is 85% in a few bands.)
Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.
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.
America provides food stamps that provide groceries to those who need it.
However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".
I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.
I didn't say free restaurants for everyone, that's a ridiculous extrapolation.
But it is the responsibility of a decent modern society to ensure kids get at least a basic level of care and education. Morally, and in fact in the interests of having a decently educated and functional society.
For foodstamp groceries, are you expecting the kids to prepare their own lunch?
It seems like another callous 'personal responsibility' argument.
Our "decent modern society" already does this, because the government SNAP program guarantees that anyone for whom the standard food budget is not met by their income receives government support.
Groceries, however, are expected to be bought by parents and then meals prepared for their children. I don't expect children to prepare their own lunch, but I do expect their parents to - and the same for breakfast, dinner, and snacks. I consider not doing this to be a rather serious form of child neglect. Correcting this problem would be another responsibility of a "decent, modern society", although usually the best way to do that is to require parents to go to parenting classes and get help to overcome their neglect.
Again, just provide the kids themselves with decent (not stratified) meals, rather than tying it to parental responsibility or otherwise. It's like you're trying to make a mean society.
How are children in such situations supposed to get breakfast and dinner?
I'm not arguing against universal school lunches here. I am arguing against the idea society should somehow be providing prepared meals, unless "society" includes "children's parents".
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.)
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.
And there may be many unrelated programs that fully cut funding at nearly the same level, making it a compounding problem. You might lose several benefits the moment your household income moves from 149% of poverty level to 151%, for instance.
But, also, that's because there isn't one monolithic agency that's in charge of all benefits... and that may be a good thing.
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?
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.
Only in some places. In others (like ours) they can keep buying lunch when they've a debt. The kid just can't buy side items (junk food like cookies, ice cream, chips, soda)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>the kid doesn’t go hungry, the kid gets a sandwich instead of an institutional pizza slice.
Unless it's gotten a lot better from when I was in grade school, the "alternative meal" was the bare minimum they could get away with (it was a piece of white bread with cheese, although it sounds like now the standard is a seed-butter sandwich). It doesn't exist to feed the kid, it exists to shame them, and any nutrition provided is a happy coincidence.
I had to get it once as a kid (although my parents didn't get a bill) and it was too embarrassing to even eat. Even at a table with all your friends you feel like an outsider through no fault of your own.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Europe has quite a bit individualism too. Maybe even more when people can freely express themselves without judgment, you know.
But to have individualism for everybody, everybody needs to eat and have a dignified life.
Cutting less lucky people's food and healthcare for penny pinching, or worse religiously followed ideology isn't individualism. It is sadist selfishness. It kills individuality of large swaths of people for a tiny minority's extravagant and boringly repetitive habits.
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.
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.
I am in the states, my elementary school had excellent cooked food, the middle school was slightly less good, but it had a great salad bar.
High school was like eating at a truck stop. But it did have a salad bar that was excellent, although myself and Lisa Simpson were the only students that used it.
I have the same observation in Canada. There seems to be way less "benefits" in terms of things like the food stamps program in America. I am a bit appalled at the situation with some acquaintances of mine in Ontario who simply struggle to afford food each month; they don't make a great deal of money but they just do not qualify for any assistance. Food banks are not well stocked either.
Meanwhile in my quite red state, a family at the 20th percentile of household income with 1 kid will get $480 in food assistance per month, which is basically enough to afford groceries to stay afloat.
My son's school is private but has a "free lunch" program (apparently paid for out of grants and involving the local grocery store's deli); we send him with a lunch we pack ourselves because we prefer he not eat Goldfish and apple juice boxes every day.
In the US, schools are managed at the state level, not the federal level. There are occasional grants given to states to run certain school programs, but states really run the show.
Which is why I'm actually not sure why certain states don't do this. Like richer states like Maryland, Virginia, New York, California.
>Which is why I'm actually not sure why certain states don't do this. Like richer states like Maryland, Virginia, New York, California.
Not sure about other states, but...
All NYC public school students can have free meals[0]:
"New York City Public Schools offers free breakfast, lunch and afterschool meals to all NYC public school students during the school year."
As for NY State -- well, better late than never[1]:
"Universal School Meals: Governor Hochul Announces Free Breakfast and Lunch for More Than 2.7 Million Students in New York as Part of the 2025 State of the State"
To be fair, free and reduced price meals were already available across NY state, but with a means test[2]:
The School Breakfast and Lunch Programs are federal programs providing free,
reduced or full priced breakfast and lunch at participating schools
throughout New York State. In New York State the New York State Department of
Education administers these programs, and local schools operate the programs.
The meals are the same for all children regardless of payment category, and
schools are not permitted to identify students who get free or reduced-price
meals.
Eligibility Meal Categories Eligibility
Free Income up to 130% of poverty ($39,000 for a family of 4 annually)
Reduced (no charge to student) Income up to 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)
Full price* - paid by family Income over 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)
Because the US is run by wealthy people and highly corrupt. If it isn't a problem for those with money, nothing will change. Look at all the major problems the US has and nearly every one of them can be easily walked around if you have a lot of money. Expensive healthcare? Well I got money. Overzealous police force? Well in an expensive neighborhood cops don't dare harass/extort random citizens. Harsh and exploitive justice system? Money will bleed to courts dry until they give up. Shitty local schools? Private education. Shitty infrastructure? Buy large SUV and generator. Polluted water? You can get good water delivered or run a whole-house reverse osmosis system.
It is highly inefficient, but if you are on top of the wealth pyramid none of that matters to you. Average citizens however can't afford all of that.
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.
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.
correct. most schools have canteens you can buy lunch from... but the "norm" is for every kid to bring recess and lunch foods every day. Keeping the bloody crows from getting into your bag and eating it is an added challenge that most rise to fairly easily.
note its also expected that you've already had breakfast before you arrive at school.
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".
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...>
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.
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.)
>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.
I'm a center-lefty, but America appears to be mostly right and I find it fascinating that this is just "accepted".
Why does America just accept that some (a large enough number that most schools have to feed them) people cant raise their kids?
We already have a system where the government can send "child raising inspectors" to your house and potentially take away your children. It's dysfunctional, yes, but it exists.
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.
>> 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.
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.
>[...] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
It is capitalism. If you fail it is your fault. Don't question the system. You just need to work harder like those rich people who were born slightly less rich.
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.
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:
I don't have kids, and will never have kids, but even so I don't see people whose children are being denied food as a problem that the children's parent's caused.
I see hungry kids who can't learn because they're distracted by hunger as the problem, and I will gladly pay taxes to see that they don't go hungry.
Without kids living and being born and learning and becoming productive members of society your lifestyle would not exist and current economic models would collapse in a handful of years.
You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.
I would agree that current models are crap, but what kind of alternative would actually be viable with dumber, less healthy, and a shrinking population? We could do with one of them, maybe two if we are just scraping by for time, but all three? That is a one way ticket to a collapse that wouldn't be overcome for many generations.
Child labor was legal until 1930. It has been a part of society for longer than it hasn't. I think your calculus is a little off.
> your lifestyle would not exist
Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough? Which, again, has been a norm in our society for longer than it hasn't. We didn't fully get rid of horses as beasts of burden in agriculture until the 1950s.
> you personally don't need to walk places.
Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
We live in a world of odd incentives. There is no point at which abandoning the middle way will benefit you, regardless of how pretty those ideas sound.
They said "without kids", not without this particular program.
> Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
> Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
These are children. Someone is carrying them no matter what.
Yes. I'm calling into question the idea that modern treatment of children is responsible for the world we live in. Clearly it is not given the relative scarcity of it in our history. I'm not saying we shouldn't give children a free lunch just that the OPs reasoning was rather lofty and detached from history.
> They said "without kids", not without this particular program.
They're replying to someone with the obvious implication that this program is in some way critical to children "learning and becoming productive members of society."
> Someone is carrying them no matter what.
Now are you serious? Do parents consider it their career to raise their own children? Does this career have the effect of increasing the number of children they care for in exchange for greater profits?
Which is why I invoked incentives. The tragedy here being that schools consider their primary obligation to the child and not to the family. So when parents are in a situation where they cannot care for their children successfully, for whatever reason, we completely ignore the core problem and instead patch over it. Worse it can sometimes create negative stigma for the child and work to further destabilize their living situation.
> I'm calling into question the idea that modern treatment of children is responsible for the world we live in.
> They're replying to someone with the obvious implication that this program is in some way critical to children "learning and becoming productive members of society."
They were not saying it's "critical" or that the specific treatment of children is responsible for anything.
It was a very simple argument that everyone should care about children growing up well because we need them.
> Does this career have the effect of increasing the number of children they care for in exchange for greater profits?
This doesn't make any sense. I understand your incentive argument but what is Big Lunch going to do, make pro-birthrate propaganda? We're already sending children to schools and expecting them to eat the school lunch by default. It doesn't matter who pays as long as the school has motivation to reduce costs.
> The tragedy here being that schools consider their primary obligation to the child and not to the family. So when parents are in a situation where they cannot care for their children successfully, for whatever reason, we completely ignore the core problem and instead patch over it.
It would cost so so much more to do that, and while I agree that it would be good, fixing poverty is super far outside the scope of a school's job.
> Worse it can sometimes create negative stigma for the child and work to further destabilize their living situation.
This is an argument for giving all students free meals. No stigma.
> Shifting the cost from the parents who had the kids onto the taxpayers is not solving the problem.
No, but it's well documented that students who eat lunches generally perform better.
> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
Sorry buddy, but you won't find a lot of sympathy from people who actually care. School lunches *are not expensive*, and there are plenty of parents who are in poverty and literally cannot afford to pay for their child's lunch.
Should the child starve? No. I strongly believe that anyone who thinks a child should starve, for whatever reason, does not belong in civilized society.
> That's not solving the problem.
You're right, it's not. But you also don't offer a different suggestion. How will you solve poverty? How will you solve neglect?
Until you offer suggestions for that, your comment strikes me as coming from someone who (at best) is sociopathic in a bad way and (possibly) someone who does not belong in civilization.
> It's making sure there will be more problems.
Perhaps.
But you could also consider it as several different types of investments in the future.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment whose return is in the form of that child's future taxes; the lack of investment is instead the death-by-starvation of that child and loss of that child's future income and/or business taxes.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment in that child's care for their fellow person. Children who have been there (in poverty and starving); who have literally had only one meal per day, are more likely to be more empathetic to the plights of the people (not just children) around them in similar situations. You should hope that, if you're in such a situation, that you could find someone who would be willing to help you.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, does solve problems. Most parents are happy to be able to afford that investment themselves, but some parents -- through pride or neglect or other reasons -- are unable to afford that much. Why do you think you shouldn't help them?
One of the best ways to reduce crime and drug addiction is education. Hungry kids don't learn well. Feeding kids so they can concentrate on learning prevents problems not creates them.
> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
Hate to turn into Helen Lovejoy here, but won't you please think of the children? The victims of the problem are the children. You're trying to punish the parents, and the kids get caught in the crossfire.
The entire economic future of you and all the taxpayers depends on those kids growing up.
Our entire economic structure is a ponzi scheme at global scale. It depends on kids growing up and cashing into the stock market so people can cash out of their 401ks.
So why not ensure those little gremlins and nice and plump when they grow up so we can retire more easily.
Compared to the rest of the school system, the price of a kid's lunch is a small amount of money, and it's certainly not worth the overhead of bookkeeping, administration, payment processing, and checking eligibility for each individual kid.
Take Finland as an example. Schools are paid for by taxpayers, costing around 8,000 euros per student per year [1] (the numbers don't change much regardless of which level of education you look at). Of that just 570 euro pay for balanced and healthy meals (mostly labor costs).[2] That works out to roughly 3 euro per meal.
The benefit of a good meal probably outweigh many other things you could do with that money when it comes to educating children that are your future taxpayers.
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.
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.
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)
Honestly my answer is no.
I want my property taxes to ensure that my kids get the best possible start.
My money supports my kids and those kids that live in my area.
I would say yes to paying more property tax to support my local schools to an even greater degree. I am in no way ok with my kids school funding getting reduced to fund other areas. I specifically moved to this area for the good schools.
I would be ok with an additional penny of sales tax to fund a statewide program to ensure all kids have access to food.
You can always give your government (including schools) extra money if you think they need it more than you do, or if you think they can use it better than than you can.
Taxes just force everyone else to give the government money.
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.
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.
Yeah but we currently have a $2T deficit. We could do all sorts of good for "less than 10% of the DoD's annual budget", but we are already spending far more money than we bring in. The DoD's budget needs to be reduced by like 50% (along with a lot of other departments/programs) to have even a hope of getting debt under control, let alone introducing new "think of the children" expenses
If a school lunch is served for free, then parents who would have bought that lunch now get to keep the money. If we would raise taxes to fund these programs, it's possible the majority of people could actually save money.
Nothing else changing, the families who were paying for lunch would come out ahead (they lose the expense, but taxes are over EVERYONE, and most people don't have school-aged children).
>It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5.
Sure but half of that is profit, so it's a silly thing to even mention. If you are using bad faith exams intentionally, it's a good sign that your comment is being made in bad faith.
>$77 billion a year.
I'm not sure you how go to 77 billion from 71 million kids, but whatever, if that's what it costs we should do it.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] threadFear 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.
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.
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.
I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%.
> 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?
You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less.
These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.
The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.
I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.
The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.
While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.
This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.
No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.
In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
Are you disagreeing with me, or just reframing the discussion? Pick one mode of discussion, please, I find it hard to follow if you start off disagreeing but then switch gears and decide to reframe the discussion.
I encourage you to speak as much as you want about the fact that our accounting system sucks at dealing with externalities. However, we are still slaves to accounting, somewhat. Nobody rational expects a fridge to be a profit source. But if you take taxes, people expect an accounting of how the taxes are spent. “This program costs money but has benefits that outweigh the cost” is pretty easy to understand. The program doesn’t pay for itself because we don’t have a way to put better outcomes on the books.
We also don’t have an accounting system that lets me show a net positive for buying a movie ticket.
That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)
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
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.
We are to celebrate those who get out of paying taxes by any means and looking the other way when others take from the commons.
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
It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
(1) not actually me, since I'm not a US citizen just a pro-Russia bot.
If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.
Millions and millions for apps and taps and other worthless junk is annoying, and the recovery barely pays for the machines, let alone the lines.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.
Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.
Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.
In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.
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.
[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...
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 is an understatement. Florida's unemployment system for example was designed intentionally to fail when too many people tried to file for benefits to prevent them from having to pay out. This of course blew up into a whole scandal during covid when a bunch of people were suddenly unemployed and all tried filing at the same time which is how it officially came out that the system was designed from the start to function like this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
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.
Penny Rich Dollar Poor.
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...
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.
The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.
The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten".
The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.
This, food waste is built into the system. It'd be nice if it wasn't but every restaurant and cafeteria throws away just as much food as they sell, most people just don't realize it because they've never worked in food service.
The waste is just a necessary component even in for profit systems. It's still better to feed everyone than to not. Even if the only thing you are allowed to do is to give to students, then you send them home with several meals worth to use up the leftovers.
Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.
No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.
I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.
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.
These governing bodies need to Do Better. They need to work on themselves.
Sports are a big part of American culture and smugly ruining them with nonsense makes Americans mad. This is not difficult to understand.
Should we ban sex for athletes? At a high school level?
Men and women are not the same. They are a distinct, binary grouping. One cannot measure up to the metrics, characteristics, etc of the other. Women have their own sports leagues because of this. Men do not have exclusive leagues, its illegal in most western countries anyway under discrimination laws. Women just cant compete at these levels though. Thats not a moral judgement but a plain reading of the facts.
As far as the incoming remark about "controlling what high school students do in private with each other", I will rather present you with a question:
Should we make it impossible for thousands of girls to get a gold medal, XOR allow 1 person, born a male and currently pretending/presenting as a woman, to dominate the competition? This is the actual, real life decision that leagues of all kinds must make, from football to chess.
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 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"
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.
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.
On the contrary. Many people favor individually managed efforts because they disagree with your premise, and believe that such efforts scale better than centrally managed ones.
They favor individual efforts because they don’t want certain groups being helped.
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.
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.
I'd argue that recent elections demonstrate enough of the people _are_ voting cruelty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.
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.
Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
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.
I think steep gradients are OK, as long as they are not over 100%. When someone is working and earning very little, they need all the help they can get. As they earn more, they need less help, and should start to shift to instead contributing to helping others. There is probably some ideal "ramp" that provides the right set of incentives. I think 75% is probably too high.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Ridiculous.
Of course, if it's free, then it's just the default, and some people will strive to be better than 'the masses' and pay for private education.
But in any case, your whole society gets decently educated, which makes everyone richer, in every way.
1. Students usually are not interested in attending classes, like at the middle school. 2. Bachelor/masters degrees means nothing as everyone has one.
One is just worthless paper, the other is equal opportunity for everyone to actually attain the standard required for a degree.
During my student years I could only dream of attending lectures from Stanford or MIT! Nowadays they are at your fingertips anytime you want.
However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".
I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.
But it is the responsibility of a decent modern society to ensure kids get at least a basic level of care and education. Morally, and in fact in the interests of having a decently educated and functional society.
For foodstamp groceries, are you expecting the kids to prepare their own lunch? It seems like another callous 'personal responsibility' argument.
Groceries, however, are expected to be bought by parents and then meals prepared for their children. I don't expect children to prepare their own lunch, but I do expect their parents to - and the same for breakfast, dinner, and snacks. I consider not doing this to be a rather serious form of child neglect. Correcting this problem would be another responsibility of a "decent, modern society", although usually the best way to do that is to require parents to go to parenting classes and get help to overcome their neglect.
I'm not arguing against universal school lunches here. I am arguing against the idea society should somehow be providing prepared meals, unless "society" includes "children's parents".
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.
But, also, that's because there isn't one monolithic agency that's in charge of all benefits... and that may be a good thing.
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.
This is not a universal.
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.
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.
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.
Unless it's gotten a lot better from when I was in grade school, the "alternative meal" was the bare minimum they could get away with (it was a piece of white bread with cheese, although it sounds like now the standard is a seed-butter sandwich). It doesn't exist to feed the kid, it exists to shame them, and any nutrition provided is a happy coincidence.
I had to get it once as a kid (although my parents didn't get a bill) and it was too embarrassing to even eat. Even at a table with all your friends you feel like an outsider through no fault of your own.
Edit: Fixed some misunderstanding in my comment.
But yeah, the problem you point out — families can go into debt again — is real, I think.
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.
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.
What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?
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.
individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests
But to have individualism for everybody, everybody needs to eat and have a dignified life.
Cutting less lucky people's food and healthcare for penny pinching, or worse religiously followed ideology isn't individualism. It is sadist selfishness. It kills individuality of large swaths of people for a tiny minority's extravagant and boringly repetitive habits.
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.
High school was like eating at a truck stop. But it did have a salad bar that was excellent, although myself and Lisa Simpson were the only students that used it.
Meanwhile in my quite red state, a family at the 20th percentile of household income with 1 kid will get $480 in food assistance per month, which is basically enough to afford groceries to stay afloat.
My son's school is private but has a "free lunch" program (apparently paid for out of grants and involving the local grocery store's deli); we send him with a lunch we pack ourselves because we prefer he not eat Goldfish and apple juice boxes every day.
It's always crazy to learn that you guys are so different from us when you dig into the details of things.
Which is why I'm actually not sure why certain states don't do this. Like richer states like Maryland, Virginia, New York, California.
Not sure about other states, but...
All NYC public school students can have free meals[0]:
"New York City Public Schools offers free breakfast, lunch and afterschool meals to all NYC public school students during the school year."
As for NY State -- well, better late than never[1]:
"Universal School Meals: Governor Hochul Announces Free Breakfast and Lunch for More Than 2.7 Million Students in New York as Part of the 2025 State of the State"
To be fair, free and reduced price meals were already available across NY state, but with a means test[2]:
[0] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/food[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/universal-school-meals-gove...
[2] https://otda.ny.gov/workingfamilies/schoollunch.asp
It is highly inefficient, but if you are on top of the wealth pyramid none of that matters to you. Average citizens however can't afford all of that.
Why did this idea ever take off?
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.
note its also expected that you've already had breakfast before you arrive at school.
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'm a center-lefty, but America appears to be mostly right and I find it fascinating that this is just "accepted".
Why does America just accept that some (a large enough number that most schools have to feed them) people cant raise their kids?
Or perhaps are you saying that the government should provide a nanny to everybody that can't raise their kid?
What I see is a cultural/community problem.
I see people on Facebook who refer to their kids, unironically, as "future warriors for Christ".
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.
> ...
> 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...
- people buying new
- but looking for the cheapest trims
- on an aggressively short loan
is particularly large. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the 108 month or more loans starting to show up, but still.
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
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-...
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/
Shifting the cost from the parents who had the kids onto the taxpayers is not solving the problem.
It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
That's not solving the problem.
It's making sure there will be more problems.
You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.
It's possible that's not a bad thing considering they're built on excessive consumption and an ever expanding population.
Child labor was legal until 1930. It has been a part of society for longer than it hasn't. I think your calculus is a little off.
> your lifestyle would not exist
Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough? Which, again, has been a norm in our society for longer than it hasn't. We didn't fully get rid of horses as beasts of burden in agriculture until the 1950s.
> you personally don't need to walk places.
Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
We live in a world of odd incentives. There is no point at which abandoning the middle way will benefit you, regardless of how pretty those ideas sound.
Are you serious.
> Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough?
They said "without kids", not without this particular program.
> Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
> Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
These are children. Someone is carrying them no matter what.
Yes. I'm calling into question the idea that modern treatment of children is responsible for the world we live in. Clearly it is not given the relative scarcity of it in our history. I'm not saying we shouldn't give children a free lunch just that the OPs reasoning was rather lofty and detached from history.
> They said "without kids", not without this particular program.
They're replying to someone with the obvious implication that this program is in some way critical to children "learning and becoming productive members of society."
> Someone is carrying them no matter what.
Now are you serious? Do parents consider it their career to raise their own children? Does this career have the effect of increasing the number of children they care for in exchange for greater profits?
Which is why I invoked incentives. The tragedy here being that schools consider their primary obligation to the child and not to the family. So when parents are in a situation where they cannot care for their children successfully, for whatever reason, we completely ignore the core problem and instead patch over it. Worse it can sometimes create negative stigma for the child and work to further destabilize their living situation.
They have been taking similar role before the industrial revolution.
> They're replying to someone with the obvious implication that this program is in some way critical to children "learning and becoming productive members of society."
They were not saying it's "critical" or that the specific treatment of children is responsible for anything.
It was a very simple argument that everyone should care about children growing up well because we need them.
> Does this career have the effect of increasing the number of children they care for in exchange for greater profits?
This doesn't make any sense. I understand your incentive argument but what is Big Lunch going to do, make pro-birthrate propaganda? We're already sending children to schools and expecting them to eat the school lunch by default. It doesn't matter who pays as long as the school has motivation to reduce costs.
> The tragedy here being that schools consider their primary obligation to the child and not to the family. So when parents are in a situation where they cannot care for their children successfully, for whatever reason, we completely ignore the core problem and instead patch over it.
It would cost so so much more to do that, and while I agree that it would be good, fixing poverty is super far outside the scope of a school's job.
> Worse it can sometimes create negative stigma for the child and work to further destabilize their living situation.
This is an argument for giving all students free meals. No stigma.
Having not-starving kids is beneficial to literally everyone in the community, not just the kids who use the program.
No, but it's well documented that students who eat lunches generally perform better.
> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
Sorry buddy, but you won't find a lot of sympathy from people who actually care. School lunches *are not expensive*, and there are plenty of parents who are in poverty and literally cannot afford to pay for their child's lunch.
Should the child starve? No. I strongly believe that anyone who thinks a child should starve, for whatever reason, does not belong in civilized society.
> That's not solving the problem.
You're right, it's not. But you also don't offer a different suggestion. How will you solve poverty? How will you solve neglect?
Until you offer suggestions for that, your comment strikes me as coming from someone who (at best) is sociopathic in a bad way and (possibly) someone who does not belong in civilization.
> It's making sure there will be more problems.
Perhaps.
But you could also consider it as several different types of investments in the future.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment whose return is in the form of that child's future taxes; the lack of investment is instead the death-by-starvation of that child and loss of that child's future income and/or business taxes.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment in that child's care for their fellow person. Children who have been there (in poverty and starving); who have literally had only one meal per day, are more likely to be more empathetic to the plights of the people (not just children) around them in similar situations. You should hope that, if you're in such a situation, that you could find someone who would be willing to help you.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, does solve problems. Most parents are happy to be able to afford that investment themselves, but some parents -- through pride or neglect or other reasons -- are unable to afford that much. Why do you think you shouldn't help them?
Hate to turn into Helen Lovejoy here, but won't you please think of the children? The victims of the problem are the children. You're trying to punish the parents, and the kids get caught in the crossfire.
The entire economic future of you and all the taxpayers depends on those kids growing up.
Our entire economic structure is a ponzi scheme at global scale. It depends on kids growing up and cashing into the stock market so people can cash out of their 401ks.
So why not ensure those little gremlins and nice and plump when they grow up so we can retire more easily.
Let it fall. No more ponzi schemes.
Take Finland as an example. Schools are paid for by taxpayers, costing around 8,000 euros per student per year [1] (the numbers don't change much regardless of which level of education you look at). Of that just 570 euro pay for balanced and healthy meals (mostly labor costs).[2] That works out to roughly 3 euro per meal.
The benefit of a good meal probably outweigh many other things you could do with that money when it comes to educating children that are your future taxpayers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134054/finland-regular-... [2] https://www.schoolmealscoalition.org/sites/default/files/202...
It is mind boggling that we leave kids starving in america, and we are going to pay for it for decades.
My money supports my kids and those kids that live in my area. I would say yes to paying more property tax to support my local schools to an even greater degree. I am in no way ok with my kids school funding getting reduced to fund other areas. I specifically moved to this area for the good schools.
I would be ok with an additional penny of sales tax to fund a statewide program to ensure all kids have access to food.
Taxes just force everyone else to give the government money.
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...
Sure but half of that is profit, so it's a silly thing to even mention. If you are using bad faith exams intentionally, it's a good sign that your comment is being made in bad faith.
>$77 billion a year.
I'm not sure you how go to 77 billion from 71 million kids, but whatever, if that's what it costs we should do it.
77,745,000,000
A dollar a meal, three times a day, three sixty five days a year. Pretty simple.
Which is why it's silly I suppose.
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.
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.
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.
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.