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.
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
richlower 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…
That was a great read. The Onion meets the New Yorker. But how was it free to read? Did Society pay?
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?
Cruelty is the point.
Because feeding and supporting children doesn’t get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.
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.
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.
Cheat Sheet:
Is it good? Republicans will want to ban it.
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.”
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
