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I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#111

Post by bombcar »

ItsBob wrote: post #61

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 ther…

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:

https://www.dmo.gov.uk/responsibilities/public-sector-funds-...

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#112

Post by em-bee »

phkahler wrote: post #41

>> 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…

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#113

Post by neilv »

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#114

Post by bombcar »

alwa wrote: post #48
infecto wrote: post #12

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 f…

It's good to remember that AI isn't the only thing that hallucinates scenarios.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#115

Post by dani__german »

apercu wrote: post #94
humanrebar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes. The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.

> 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.

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#116

Post by piva00 »

Kapura wrote: post #68
M3L0NM4N wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#117

Post by bombcar »

senectus1 wrote: post #29

(I'm in Australia) I dont understand why this concept of schools providing lunches ever became a thing... Why did this idea ever take off?

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.)

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#118

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

criddell wrote: post #52
mbfg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#119

Post by internetter »

dahart wrote: post #104
internetter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#120

Post by frakt0x90 »

bombcar wrote: post #106
rpcope1 wrote: post #82

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.

Let's assume (bad assumption, but it should be good enough for the math) that a Happy Meal™®© is a decent meal. 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 scho…

The price you pay at the kiosk is not the cost of production.
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