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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

#201

Post by trollbridge »

fortran77 wrote: post #195
creer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation. Which is how some parts of US taxation works, but not other parts. You seem to be in one part, and unaware of the rest. (And is a mix of taxation and other "eligibility" issues, with poorly advertised massive cliffs here and there for extra helpfulness).

There may be some cases--if a person is on the edge of being eligible for SNAP, or for SSDI for a dependent adult in their houshold, where getting a raise might actually make them poorer. It's wrong to say people do this because they're too stupid to know about marginal tax rates.

My state fixed this so the marginal rate was never over 100%, but there is a rather wide range where the marginal rate is about 75%. For every dollar you earn, you keep 25¢, and are paying in 75¢ in the form of getting fewer refundable tax credits, food stamps, energy bill assistance, and so on. (If I include the energy bill assistance, the marginal rate is 85% in a few bands.)

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

#202

Post by rufus_foreman »

mproud wrote: post #63

I love living in Minnesota. Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago. I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve. [^1] https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/FNS/SNP/free/

>> gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve

Shifting the cost from the parents who had the kids onto the taxpayers is not solving the problem.

It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.

That's not solving the problem.

It's making sure there will be more problems.

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

#203

Post by reassess_blind »

AzzyHN wrote: post #197
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?

Cruelty is the point sometimes as well

Who’s cruelty, and what’s the motivation?

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

#204

Post by ctkhn »

klodolph wrote: post #123
snarf21 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much…

I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.

the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/

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

#205

Post by trollbridge »

jacknews wrote: post #70
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #5

It's astonishing this is a thing. I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free with no questions asked. Where I live, kids can get breakfast too, however I've heard that isn't universal in the state. The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here…

"It's astonishing this is a thing." Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.

America provides food stamps that provide groceries to those who need it.

However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".

I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.

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

#206

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

klodolph wrote: post #123
snarf21 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much…

I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.

Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.

In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.

This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.

No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.

In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.

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

#207

Post by ipsum2 »

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?

Most states have free or reduced priced lunch for those who are low-income. The families who can afford to pay, do.

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

#208

Post by irrational »

I’m thankful I live in a state that uses my tax money to make all school breakfast and lunches free. I wonder what percentage of state taxes is actually required to pay for all school breakfast and lunches? Making sure kids aren’t inhibited from learning because of empty stomachs seems like a no brainer.

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

#209

Post by gs17 »

0max wrote: post #189
jaggederest wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need votekick, but in real life. Clearly this is a concept that could have no practical downsides...

You're reminding me of Team Fortress 2 server nightmares from last year with all the hackers and bots

Even before the bots, I remember MvM being unplayable if you weren't with enough friends to make votekick impossible (and that wouldn't stop them from trying, but they'd ragequit themselves when no one votes yes, and leave you down a player).

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

#210

Post by dahart »

klodolph wrote: post #190
dahart wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

2010s and 2020s are the two different decades. I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%. > 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…

I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
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