The United States is ruled by literal Captain Planet villains
The United States is ruled by literal Captain Planet villains
Any parent can tell you that a hungry child isn't capable of doing any complex activity. Attempting to educate a kid who hasn't eaten in god knows how long, for whatever reason, isn't going to work.
Beyond that, universal school breakfast and lunch help people who can afford it by removing yet another thing for parents to worry about. And it eliminates the stigma of only the poor kids getting free lunches.
Republicans have been disdainful of public education since before I was born, so they're trying to make it fail by continuing to spend money trying to teach hungry kids.
And it eliminates the stigma of only the poor kids getting free lunches.
The stigma is the point.
Conservatives believe receiving charity should be shameful.
Because conservatives (and neoliberals) think poverty is a personal moral failure - if you're poor, it's not because society and capitalism and racism and structural inequality screwed you over, it's because you, personally, were lazy or wasted your money or broke the law or didn't work hard enough.
So if a child can't afford a school lunch, it's because their parents are bad people. And shaming that child with an obvious "free lunch" (I remember having a bright red card that I had to show in the cafeteria, and the lunch lady would sneer at me and loudly proclaim "here is your FREE LUNCH" and hand me a cheese sandwich and an apple when the other kids were getting pizza just to make sure everybody knew my parents were poor) teaches the child to be ashamed of their parents and be ashamed of their poverty so they'll work harder to avoid poverty as adults.
And if schools give every child free lunch, not only do they lose that "teaching opportunity", they teach children that food is a right and that everybody, no matter their economic status, should have enough to eat, which is a direct attack on the fundamental principles of capitalism and American society.
Go into a conservative space and tell them people have a right to food and shelter and medical care and watch them froth in rage.
Wow I never put it together before but you are right, the free lunch was a lesson to work hard and not be poor, and I have to say it worked on me. We had our free lunches provided in a very distinct white paper bag and you had to walk to the office to get it, then walk back down to the cafeteria after everyone was already sitting down. So everyone got to see the white bag lunch as you walked in, and everyone knew what it meant. Would it have killed the school to use the standard brown paper bag, or give it to us on a lunch tray with the hot lunch kids? No but if the reason was to embarrass me into not being poor it worked. I promised myself that my kids would never have to deal with that embarrassment, and so far I've kept that promise.
Go into a conservative space and tell them people have a right to food and shelter and medical care and watch them froth in rage.
But if you specifically say that they have a right to those things, they'll wholeheartedly agree.
This is what they claim, but the true reasoning behind this is that the primary way to defeat their own predation of others is for others to help each other; in other words charity defeats their cruelty. These narcissists want everyone to be wholly dependent on them (hence the projections of people being dependent on government) and rail against anything that defeats that dependence.
Brainwashing children to "work harder" comes with the implicit condition of "for narcissists" because to a narcissist, the only purpose other people have is to do things for the narcissist.
Basic, and higher education should be on that list. I'd aslo argue for utilities, and AFAIC utilities should be public, and include telecommunications companies, not just water, electric, and mass transit.
Oh man, that is so fucked up. The UK has its own problems around attitudes towards the poor, but I never saw anything like this in school. My school had cards that you had to load credit onto, and people with free school meals had a standard amount automatically added on each day.
Any parent can tell you that a hungry child isn’t capable of doing any complex activity.
Neither is a hungry adult. Free access to food should be a constitutional right.
If we can force all the kids into a school, the goddamn LEAST we can do is toss them some snacks
Keep them hungry, keep them dumb. Make it so only the already rich have access to education. Keep the power in the hand of the wealthy few.
Ohhh, they're opposing universal free meals while wanting to keep the free meals for students from poor families. That makes way more sense than opposing both. Not cartoonishly evil. It's possible that it's for purely utilitarian reasons.
Typical politics taking things out of context and extrapolating.
(No, I am not endorsing the republican party or saying that universal free meals for students should be blocked.)
It isn't quite as insane as the headline makes it sound.
But anyway, maybe Republicans are worried that if anyone sees a "socialist" type of program at work they might think it is kind of a good idea in certain circumstances. O noes 😨
what the fuck is wrong with america?
Republicans.
Well, rightists in general. Unfortunately there is a non-zero percentage of rightist Democrats, as well.
That's not to say that Democrats are perfect though. With the people who are in charge that are Democrats being severely uneducated, such as Biden saying that cannons and flamethrowers are illegal and impossible to own. Overall the issue is that nobody directly has any opinion or control. We vote for people that make decisions for us and they don't always upkeep their promises and make decisions people that voted for them like. There is no exactly perfect candidate, voting eliminates most bad candidates, but voting directly in as many matters as possible is a much better and reliable democracy than the current system.
the democratic party is largely a right wing conservative party, so i would assume so
“Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked.”
- George Carlin literally decades ago
An epidemic of narcissists, which the U.S. doesn't know how to contain, much less eliminate.
Mandatory psilocybin doses might do it.
The narcissists include those who have allowed republicans into power - and to erode any social safety nets they can get their paws on - for DECADES, by sitting on their lazy mediocre asses on Election Day, fondling their
ignorancepurity then lovingly sniffing their fingers... bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRitE.
We're addicted to tearing one another down to feel better about ourselves. Our country has become the national embodiment of schadenfreude.
Help.
There’s always a group of people or party that want to tear others down. From slavery and seceding, to wanting segregation laws and harassing minorities. In other countries you had apartheid and Nazis. It’s a constant battle/struggle against evil and those wanting to dismantle and control others.
I'd prefer if you asked what the fuck is right with America so the answer can be two sentences rather than the length of a novel.
What a repugnant group of idiots.
Just rebrand it to prepaid lunch and they'll stop bitching. They're too stupid to realize that's what it means
“Something something both sides are the same.”
On the one hand, Biden is mostly anti-union and pro-corporate. On the other hand Republicans want your kids to starve to death.
Honestly who can choose these days?! /s
Interesting. I personally support Universal School Breakfasts / Lunches but what the Republicans want to do here isn't quite as heinous as the headline would have you believe.
You can read the RSC Budget here (PDF Warning) and can find the School Lunch thing on page 34.
What Republicans want is to eliminate CEP in order to force Means Testing for Free / Reduced School lunch. Government Auditors have apparently found a fair bit of fraud in the program and in this case fraud is people who are outside the financial guidelines who have lied about their income in order to get free or reduced cost lunches. The School Districts are complicit with this because the more students they have on the free / reduced lunch program the more federal money they get. You can a lot of that info from the in document citation number 144 which takes you here.
I was surprised to learn that the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Agency in charge of School Meals, spends more than 20 Billion dollars a year on this! There's a great non-partisan Congressional Report on this that you can read here. (PDF Warning).
Also, your source for fraud in the school lunch program comes from a site that advocates canceling all federal food aid programs, including WIC, food stamps, etc, as well as shutting down the Department of Education entirely, so, yeah, a little bit of a bias there. 🤮
It isn't "my" source. It's taken directly from the RSC Budget document. I even specified the citation number and page.
I understand the bias issue you are raising but you need to understand that they didn't come up with that fraud number, the GAO did. If you look at that section they (again not me, they) have citation number 41 which will take you to the actual GAO Report that was done during the Obama Administration.
In 2012 the USDA itself estimated that there was nearly 1 Billion dollars of "NSLP certification errors". The report used "NSLP certification errors" while the RSC Budget referred it as "fraud" but it amounts to the same thing, people using the benefits who would have been financially ineligible if closer tracking and means testing was being performed.
Unsurprisingly the USDA itself concluded that in order to stop the certification errors that they'd need to implement income verification...so that the means testing rules could actually be implemented.
So what you are seeing in regards to Free / Reduced Student Meals is that the Federal Government itself, under a Democratic President, saw that there was an issue to be addressed.
Republicans want to address the issue by giving the means testing some teeth. I would prefer that they fix it by making it universally free for all students all the time. We see the same problem, we just have different solutions.
First, food should be a right.
Second, conservatives and neoliberals love to scream about fraud and abuse of welfare programs, with or without justification, so when I hear somebody claiming that the eeeeeevil public school system is collaborating with eeeeeevil poor people to defraud honest American taxpayers, and I know that conservatives loathe the public school system as much as they loathe poor people, I just roll my eyes.
Third, means testing is not just spiteful and evil, it's routinely used as a weapon to destroy welfare programs, entitlement programs, and social services in general. It's why Republicans keep bringing up means testing social security. When you impose means testing to limit the number of people who directly benefit from a program, you create a division between "us" (the people who pay for a program with taxes) and "them" (poor people who benefit from the program and presumably don't pay taxes). And when a program only benefits poor people it's much easier to stigmatize and ultimately eliminate it.
Fourth, food should be a right.
Fifth, when it comes to what people can actually afford, total income on paper is only one factor - plenty of people with high total income still struggle to buy food for their kids. And frankly I'm not going to second guess people who say they need help paying for their kids' food.
Sixth, you realize I'm posting this on an anarchist instance, right? I suspect very few users here think lying to the government to feed your kids is particularly heinous.
Finally, in case you didn't hear me before, food should be a right.
You are welcome to smear children eating lunch as welfare cheats wasting taxpayer money all you like. And you wouldn't be alone in doing that. But I would ask you to spend some time thinking about the moral implications of making that argument before you distribute it further.
No, I didn't realize that slrpnk was an anarchist instance. I'm commenting from a general instance known as lemmy.today. I am curious though why anarchists are supporting a Government, isn't that kind of against your political beliefs?
Otherwise you can take the personal shots at me and toss them out the window. They can lie their there on the ground next to your reading comprehension.
Well said 👏
When did they smear children eating lunch as welfare cheats?
They literally said they support universal lunches? Did you not read what they wrote?
what is the amount of money you think is appropriate to spend on ensuring children don't starve in school?
what is the amount of money you think is appropriate to spend on ensuring children don’t starve in school?
Literally whatever it takes. Why are so many of you unable to understand that I was directly citing the provided sources and not offering my own opinion?
Further why are so many of you skipping my 2nd sentence where I clearly state my opinion which is, and I quote, "I personally support Universal School Breakfasts / Lunches..."?
This is the kind of unthinking knee-jerk neo-liberal brain death that infests almost every political discussion anywhere on the WWW these days. No one is comprehending a damn thing that they are reading. People just knee jerk their metaphorical foot directly into their metaphorical mouth.
If you can afford it you should have to pay. Simple as that
I agree, but I don't think that should be done at the school. It singles out kids who can't afford it, and it isn't their fault. It should be done via taxes. That's sortof what they're good for, right? If you can afford it, you pay increased taxes. "Free school lunch" is a lie, but it's easier to say (and sounds better) than "taxpayer funded lunch".