I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

America is a place where we don't like the idea of people going hungry. The government provides a great deal of food assistance; 13% of the country receives food stamps. Government policy is that every American should be getting at least $291 of food; if providing yourself that would be more than 30% of your income after expenses like rent, the government makes up the difference. Groceries are cheap, relatively speaking - they're sure cheaper than what they cost in Australia. We have extra programs for pregnant/nursing moms which provide food like milk, eggs, beans, and fresh produce, or if they can't or don't want to nurse, we provide infant formula for them. (Income based, but about half of new moms qualify, although in turn only around half of those new moms bother to take advantage of it.) We have excellent food banks that (at least in my area) are well-stocked. They currently have "expanded eligibility" (meaning they don't screen you when you come in) because they aren't running out of food.

We don't like the idea of kids at school going hungry either, so first we had school lunches, and now we have school breakfasts in places. We also have "summer" food programs. My state decided to use the federal funding for this for "summer EBT", which means food stamp amounts go up by what would be the cost of providing school lunches. (Americans skip out of school for 3+ months in the summer.) The general trend is towards free lunches for everyone, instead of making it income eligible.

Whether any of this is a good idea is another question. We don't seem to be a terribly healthy nation, and we eat way too much ultra-processed food which does not seem to be good for us. Big Food and Big Ag have an incredibly strong grip on government. The amount of money involved is big money. To give you an idea of the dollars we're talking, the amount of food stamps spent in America on soda was around $10 billion. You can go ahead and guess which corporation lobbied to expand soda to be eligible for purchase with food stamps.

> When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.

....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those requirements (which is almost nothing).

To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.

It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.

Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into. No exceptions.

Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen *everywhere* in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.

It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that *everyone* will pay the cultural toll. It must be *everyone*, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.

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Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.

Let it fall. No more ponzi schemes.