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11mo ago

House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

theintercept.com House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

The Republican Study Committee’s annual budget also calls to permanently defund UNRWA and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board.

On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.

Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.

Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.

Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.

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11mo ago

House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

theintercept.com /2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/

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11mo ago

House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

theintercept.com /2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/

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11mo ago

House Republicans Want to Ban Universal Free School Lunches

theintercept.com /2024/03/21/house-republicans-ban-universal-school-lunches/

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85 comments

Literally taking food out of the mouths of children. How is this the party of Christians again?
"Fuck them little shits, let em starve: Money is God."
-Jesus or something idk

So they punish the poor for the actions of the rich. Yep, that makes sense.
- The ~~rich~~ lower middle class and up aren’t doing anything wrong here. They’re being offered free lunch and their kids are accepting it.
  
  I'd rather all get free lunch if they want it. I'm just simplifying their "logic" in my other post. That even if you accept it at face value, it's dumb as fuck.

Let all children starve lest one go undeservedly fed.
Here's a cool thought experiment: if you make all student meals free, how can anyone steal food?
- You need to think like a libertarian. "If they're all getting free food they're all stealing because taxes are theft."
  
  No, they actively hate the poor, even when the money is donated freely by the rich to pay for their school lunch.
  
  No no no, if they're getting all this food free, it's because the students are the product rather than the customers.
  Ya know, I might be onto something with my bullshit...
  
  Did someone call the Libertarian PD?

Why the fuck is it so important to you freaks that children don't eat food?
- Does the Devil pay you a dollar everytime a starving kid gets hunger pangs?
- Because feeding and supporting children doesn't get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.
- Cruelty is the point.

More proof that Republicans don't care in the slightest about children one they've been born.
- They care about nobody. What was the last Republican sponsored bill that would objectively make anyone's life better?
  Somehow they have their base frothing at the mouth about these Democrat-led initiatives that help folks (not just Democrats), yet they put forth no proposal to help anyone.
  They are the party of taking things away from people not like them, but also the party of taking things away from people just like them. They are not the party of helping anyone. I cannot fathom how the large portion of their base who could be helped by such programs fails to see this.

Cheat Sheet:
Is it good? Republicans will want to ban it.

Healthcare: $300b
Infrastructure: $150b
School lunches: $15m
War: $69,420b
Someone who's good at the economy help me budget this. My country is dying.
- Split the war budget 50/50, with half going to school lunches and the rest going into guillotines.

Even if there are families that "take advantage" (as in, can afford school lunch themselves), so the hell what. It's just food. Maybe spend a fraction less on the federal defense budget and we could buy them all breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- I just plain think school should provide free lunch anyway. The kids are forced to be there, might as well feed 'em.

Experts on defrauding public services offer insight that public services are easily defrauded but are mum on any solutions that would make it harder to defraud public services. The math maths.
- That's because the problem from their perspective is that the people who would defraud public services exist, and their rage is high enough that they accept the people who simply use public services as collateral damage.
  Bah, who am I kidding... They don't care about humans. They're just interested in that money going towards private businesses (Especially if they have a generous lobbyist from and/or stake in said business or industry)
- The problem is that any system that involves humans will have some level of waste and corruption. So they will always be able to point to that one kid who got a lunch he wasn't supposed to as a sign that the whole system should be destroyed.
- You don't want to invest in stopping fraud here. The investment costs more than you'd get back, no one is making bank stealing free school lunch. We conceded this before and made life worse for millions of people.
  You do want to invest in stopping corporate fraud, because the investments pay off there.
  
  The investment costs more than you’d get back.
  It’s a public service, what you get for your investment is the health of the public not lining for your pockets. If the only incentive in stopping fraud is profit then we’re fucked since it’s more profitable to perpetuate the fraud than to end it.
  It isn’t the recipients of the free lunch that make bank, it’s the ones that are given a contract, subsidy or grant to provide them that do. All you have to do is be willing to provide a substandard service and any costs that are saved can be folded back into private hands.
  Please, be less naive.

"We literally just want to make things worse for everyone involved."

Where are we going to get the money to balance the budget? Out of the mouth of babes, apparently.
I just checked with my k-12 schools. Breakfast is about $2 based on level of schooling, while lunch is around $3. At that point, I kind of wonder if it's really worth it collecting the money when it probably does little to collect revenue. Just make it easier for everyone.
- I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.
  
  Exactly. There's a lot of infrastructure that goes into payment. It's also another thing that low income parents have to deal with.
- The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.

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

These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things. I wish the worst for them. They're evil.
- I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it's simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.
  So this is especially evil to me.
  Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.
  A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn't realize that most of these kids didn't have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week... Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.
  
  Means testing has always been the best way to destroy a public good.
- These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things.
  This is actually the best argument against what they are doing. I fully support not paying for other kids food when they dont need it, but if we spend a trillion on military every year, they dont care about fiscal conservatism.

The Panthers need to come back

I'd MUCH rather STARVE hungry kids so Elon Musk can make a couple extra dollars!
-Save The Children Republicans.
- Oh, no, no, it's "Think of the Children"! Saving them requires actual effort.
  /s
- My anti abortion friends will say "the problem is they don't care about the children after they're born" and then happily go vote for trump again this Nov because their church told them joe Biden is the devil.

republicans would force women to birth children but the child would exit the mother by a slide that leads down the hallway and into a giant garbage can full of screaming babies

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

Do it.
I will start a free lunch program the next fucking day, I have a whole city full of fucking commies ready to go, I will feed your babies bellies delicious food and I will feed their minds revolutionary proletarian theory. I will teach their parents about Marx and Lenin and Fanon, Luxemburg and Kwame Ture. and we will take this shit over.
Ideologically driven psychos forget how this shit started in the first place. We remember.
- I'll volunteer if you're around me lmao
- Divine rage.
  I worked a breakfast grill at a restaurant as a teen and got pretty good at it. I'll make that kid the most perfect breakfast omelette they've ever eaten. And I'll bring the ingredients if we're short.
  Also worked @a food pantry not long ago, warehouse work mostly but I got to see some of the parents and kids who showed up, long lines out into the northern cold, every day we were open, just to get a day or two's worth of something to eat.
  Anyone who would means-test a kid out of a free school meal, or deny them altogether, is some kind of sociopath monster.

U.S. will give billions of dollars to support genocide, but won't feed it's own children. We've surpassed biblical levels of evil.

Republicans hate everyone & everything— except white men
- They like the wealthy, most happen to be white males but white men that aren't rich people that don't donate to them can use their boot straps. They care about that demographic at elections and most are willing to vote against their interests.
- Except white men and controlling the rest, hence the support for a dumb wall

Here’s a link to the actual press release which contains links both to the actual budget as well as paragraph by paragraph summaries.
http://rsc-hern.house.gov/media/press-releases/rsc-releases-fy25-budget-proposal-fiscal-sanity-save-america
- Thi budget has the word "Biiden" in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words "woke ideology". Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.
- The line "Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs" just cracks me up. "People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don't like".
- Like hell am I going to be lectured on 'fiscal sanity' by a political party that wants the rich to keep bumming off of people who do not have money for their hard-earned money.

quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank
As a libertarian, the Cato Institute has a lot of nonsense, and this is one of them.
Here's my take: if we require students to be in school during certain hours, the school should be obligated to provide everything they need, from supplies to meals. It's the same idea as with prisons, if we, as a society, decide that certain individuals need to be locked up, they should have their needs provided for. Same thing if we detain someone at custom for hours or whatever.
On the flipside, there should be a way to opt-out for parents who don't want the school-provided lunches. There are plenty of parents who think school lunches are unhealthy, so perhaps there's an argument that they should get some kind of cash card to help pay for home-provided meals that's equivalent to the cost to make the school lunch (like $2-3/lunch). That sounds kind of complicated, so I obviously wouldn't lead with that, but maybe it'll resolve some people's concerns.
If we want to save money (and I think we should), we should shut down a few of our foreign military bases and end federal student loan programs. Those are a lot more expensive than school lunches...
- Fun fact, some places do force inmates to pay for their own incarceration and will hand you a bill when you leave https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-of-states-allow-people-to-be-charged-for-time-behind-bars
  
  That's disgusting. If society decides someone is too dangerous to live in society, they must pay for that person to be separated from society. This is a natural check on BS laws that would otherwise be used to justify slavery.
  So I consider that practice to be a violation of the eighth and the thirteenth amendments. I also think the exemption from forced labor as punishment for a crime is immoral, and argue the convicted should always be given an alternative to labor (e.g. community service as an alternative to a fine or incarceration). If not, there's a perverse incentive for jails to keep prisoners past their original sentence with additional charges heaped on top.
  My state fortunately bans forced labor, and generally has decent policies around pay-to-stay. From my search, only those with a paycheck at the time of incarceration pay in some areas, and in another area, income earned in prison may be withheld to pay restitution for their victims. But AFAIK, nowhere in my state unconditionally charges fees. So I think we're doing better, but I'll look and see if the are movements to eliminate the fees we have.
  
  Wow that's fucking cringe.
  
  Slave state
- I see a big problem with the opt-out being abusive parents could pocket the money without feeding the child.
  Money isn't the only barrier to food security.
  
  Sure, and perhaps parents opting out would put a big target on their back for CPS and similar services.
- IMO guaranteed child welfare (including universal lunch) is 100% consistent with any major political idealogy that is internally consistent.
  Libertarianism? The whole basis is the personal choice, autonomy, and the ethics of consent. Children fundamentally cannot consent. They still, however, individual agents. They simply are in a state where social order defines their outcome. As society, we must then take this to maximize their outcomes and ultimately their personal liberty - when they reach an age where they can operate with it.
  Therefore, we have to choose between depriving others of a relatively small resource, or depriving children of a major resource: the nature of their ability to participate with full autonomy and personal liberty.
  The choice, in my opinion, is very clear.
  
  Exactly.
  I'm a fan of libertarian paternalism, which is all about society choosing good defaults because it's clear individuals often make poor choices (especially when uninformed). Individuals who can consent or who have the legal responsibility over someone else should be able to choose something different. However, you should also be legally liable for any changes to defaults you make on behalf of someone else (e.g. choosing to forego school lunches for your child and not providing a nutritious meal is theft and abuse).
  This is an issue of rights. Until kids can consent, they have a right to proper nutrition and whatnot because they didn't consent to being brought into the world.
  So yeah, the choices are between everyone suffering a minor inconvenience (slightly higher taxes) to guarantee the rights of children, or children suffer. It's absolutely clear, the minor inconvenience wins.

FTA:
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,”
nobody knows more about fraud and abuse than Republicans

If feeding kids is a red line then there are no red lines.

They only succeed through misery, then blame it on those who suffer the most when that misery come to pass

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

Republicans: Want people to have more children
Also Republicans: Hey let's make it harder for people to care for the children they have

So when do you think they’ll apply “If any, then none” logic to corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns?
Never? Oh, really then.
The suffering is the point.
- corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns
  And the military-industrial-complex, which is sort of all-of-the-above, yeah. It's got waste, corruption, criminality (see Boeing), and "bad finance" (meaning public debt finance of any sort) from top to bottom, through and through, yet Republicans can't get enough of it. Starving a kid is fighting "socialism", but starving a socialized military or a ~~defense~~ offense contractor of a penny .... now that can't be tolerated.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The program thus relieves both schools and families from administrative paperwork, removing the inefficiencies and barriers of means-testing, all on the pathway to feeding more children and lifting all boats.
The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program.
Its annual budget is not binding, but it does offer a useful window into conservatives’ policy priorities, which can best be summarized as accelerating the planet’s burning, an indifference to mass shootings, and actively threatening consumers and workers.
On reproductive rights, Republicans call for the passage of an array of anti-choice bills, like Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’s “Ending Chemical Abortions Act of 2023,” which would federally outlaw the use of abortion pills, and West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney’s “Life at Conception Act,” which would designate embryos made through in vitro fertilization as being alive — even as many of the same Republicans have scrambled to claim they support IVF in the aftermath of a similar Alabama Supreme Court ruling that led multiple clinics to halt IVF procedures.
Other Republican budget priorities include eliminating all future funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees; prohibiting federal subsidies for high-speed rail; getting rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; reducing funding for the famously under-supported Occupational Safety and Health Administration; and eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, which, under President Joe Biden, has done much to protect workers’ right to organize.
The original article contains 1,331 words, the summary contains 297 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

"It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste."
TIL that a middle class family benefiting from the tax dollars they pay for is 'fraud'. Since the rich pay no taxes, they have no right to tell us what to do with our own tax dollars. Simple as. Plus, it's FOOD in the US, we grow so much that NOT diverting some of the extra crops to school lunches is pure waste.

I thought universal meant everyone was entitled it it.

85 comments