I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

property taxes go to schools in your own area. would you also support that taxes be redistributed to other areas that don't have enough tax income and where people can't afford higher taxes? because as i see it, that is the real problem in the way schools in the US are funded. (i am hoping/assuming your answer is yes, but i think the distinction is important and needs to be pointed out)

I feel like this has already been discussed before one million times more than the simplicity of the issue should require.

Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or because of (perceived or not) social stigma. And while adults are considered responsible for their own lives, it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction. At the same time, providing free lunch to children at school solves/eases a lot of social, health and other issues all at once, for a cost that is basically peanuts compared to how impactful it can be.

Oh, and there's the deadweight loss of those who would qualify for a benefit (under law) but fail either to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops, or who do hoop-jump, but are still denied benefits, whether through bureaucratic error, inefficiency, corruption, or other reasons.

TFA describes the first circumstance.

Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:

Patio11: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>).

Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...>

Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.

I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).

I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:

- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.

- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.

Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.

Yes and no.

The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.

Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/gates-foundation-i...>

The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.

But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiny-spark/id505053432>

So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.

Pardon my nitpick, but the “fair” -> “fare” typo is in this context more confusing than the average typo, so I thought I’d let you know :-)