I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Tue, May 06, 2025, 4:42 AM UTC

rufus_foreman wrote: post #202

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.

Post by riffraff » Tue, May 06, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #244

irrational wrote: post #208

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.

The other important part of this policy is that it normalizes kids not paying for lunch. This is important because they realized many kids who couldn't afford lunch were still skipping their free lunch because they were embarrassed to get a free lunch. When everyone gets a free lunch then nobody is embarrassed.

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 06, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #232

On the off chance you're interested in school lunches I highly recommend watching videos of Japanese school lunches on YouTube. There's a bunch out there now and if you were raised in the American system it will probably blow your mind. The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy. When I encountered it for…

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo » Tue, May 06, 2025, 4:50 AM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #116

Kapura wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recip…

Post by yieldcrv » Tue, May 06, 2025, 4:51 AM UTC

forgetfreeman wrote: post #309

yieldcrv wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking. this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if…

Except none of that is actually true. Unconvinced? Go look at a heat map of poverty in the US and then check out which states get bulk of federal assistance dollars. Note none of those states is running a massive budget surplus. While I have you I'd like to also point out that "hrrr federal government bad" is not only tautological, as an ideology it's deeply stupid . States frequently encounter problems that require…