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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

#141

Post by llm_nerd »

andreicap wrote: post #25

My poor country (Moldova) just implemented free lunches for kids in primary and middle schools. What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?

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.

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

#142

Post by hshdhdhj4444 »

> 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.

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

#143

Post by dahart »

klodolph wrote: post #126
dahart wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#144

Post by em-bee »

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?

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.

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

#145

Post by compootr »

boxed wrote: post #54
andreicap wrote: post #25

My poor country (Moldova) just implemented free lunches for kids in primary and middle schools. What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?

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.

> mentality

individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests

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

#146

Post by internetter »

dahart wrote: post #135
internetter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Ri…

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

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

#147

Post by RankingMember »

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.

> 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.

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

#148

Post by autobodie »

internetter wrote: post #140
autobodie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Oh, that’s my bad

I was going to be shocked if your case study actually found means testing worthwhile, so I read your entire comment, both others might not.

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

#149

Post by bombcar »

frakt0x90 wrote: post #120
bombcar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#150

Post by em-bee »

grimcompanion wrote: post #136
relaxing wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? - ignorance - lack of critical reasoning skills - religion - sadism - ?

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…

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.

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