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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

#471

Post by veunes »

mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

It's honestly heartbreaking - not just what you went through, but how normalized it was. That kind of survival mode shouldn't be part of any kid's school experience

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

#472

Post by framapotari »

graemep wrote: post #407
nucleardog wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. I say this as an IT worker making what most would consider an absurd amount of money and pays 0.55*absurd money in taxes, a dad, a human, etc... what the fuck does any of this matter. If a c…

I agree the child should be fed, but we also need to think about the other wide of this. It sounds as though the dad in this case was able to pay but refused to pay. What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.

All the more reason for using schools to feed children who may be abused and starved at home.

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

#473

Post by smeeger »

mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

[flagged]

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

#474

Post by osrec »

amelius wrote: post #462
mobtrain wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I wholeheartedly agree that no child should ever go hungry and school lunches should be free (from a EU country, this isn’t even a thing here), if you call people subhuman, we can't be friends, nor acquaintances.

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#475

Post by camgunz »

gred wrote: post #441
camgunz wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. This idea that we have to threaten people with literal starvation to get them to be productive members of society is ironically deeply impoverished. And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the mos…

> There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. This is a wild statement. Of course people take advantage of welfare programs. Of course welfare programs have unintended consequences and sometimes encourage immoral or anti-social behavior. That doesn't mean they're all bad or that they need to be completely eliminated, but leading with this obvious falsehood made it very hard to read the rest o…

This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things:

- The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the program. There were 640,000 SNAP fraud investigations in 2014 [0]. If they cost $1,000 each that's $640m, and I bet they cost more!

- The vast majority of fraud is either criminal, retailer, or both [1]

The "moral hazard" angle of these programs is wildly overplayed. You don't hear anything about:

- criminal trafficking

- retailer fraud

- program benefits

There's political reasons for this, but it doesn't matter. Our brainrot on social programs is intense.

> https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/covid-19-fraud-enfor...

Looking at the fact sheet linked from that release [2], that stat that jumps out to me is 3,500 individuals charged totaling $1.4b in stolen CARES Act funds (this isn't a direct stat, but the numbers only get worse if we presume even more money from this and other programs was stolen), which is $400k/individual charged. It doesn't really seem possible for a person or household to have bilked the government for $400k under the individual benefits of the CARES Act [3]. We're looking at white collar fraud here, again a thing you never hear anything about.

Finally, we should view some levels of fraud as indicative of broader social ills. For example the number of blue collar jobs has greatly diminished just in a single lifetime [4]. Could that be responsible for the dramatic increase in Social Security Disability claims (yes)?

[0]: https://www.cbpp.org/snap-combating-fraud-and-improving-prog...

[1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R45147.html

[2]: https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus/media/1347156/dl?inline

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act#Relief_to_individual...

[4]: https://cepr.net/publications/the-decline-of-blue-collar-job...

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

#476

Post by veunes »

askonomm wrote: post #366
mtnGoat wrote: post #343

As someone who experienced this first hand growing up. I consider how someone feels about free school lunch, a basic test of their humanity. If you think kids should go hungry or be embarrassed at school because of their parents finances… we can’t be friends, nor acquaintances. IMHO, you are subhuman at that point and not worth my time. My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to…

This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.

Feed all the kids, no shame, no paperwork, no bureaucratic gatekeeping - just… lunch

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

#477

Post by hombre_fatal »

bgnn wrote: post #412
mettamage wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. In the Netherlands we packed our lunches or we cycled home to eat lunch with our parents and then cycled back to school. Lunch was one of the most favorite times of my day. A break from school during school hours. What a treat!

Yeah, dry bread and cheese..

The self-hating American is all too common here, so I appreciate a self-hating Dutch to punctuate the monotony.

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

#478

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

framapotari wrote: post #458
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. I don't believe that is true. You didn't provide any support for your claim at all either. Let's just consider a single example: >In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws h…

> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state. If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a…

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so?

Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

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

#479

Post by blueflow »

cess11 wrote: post #465
blueflow wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that i use the word "Holocaust" exclusively for this specific genocide. It follows that the rest of your comment doesn't apply.

Someone wrote: "There are numerous conflicts worldwide where one side is trying to systematically destroy the other population, civilians and all. Whether they are exactly the same or how you define that is pretty secondary to that fact." To which you responded: "Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate." This was in reply to this specific context: "It's i…

> Now, what would it take for you to change your mind and to start agreeing that contemporary crimes of deliberate starvation and exterminationist policies should be tried in an international court or tribunal?

Nothing, because that's already my opinion.

> What is it that makes the Holocaust so very special?

The name.

So this has been a trivial misunderstanding on terminology, and you kinda went full flak on me. Someone else got their point proven.

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

#480

Post by veunes »

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…

I remember stumbling across one of those videos and just sitting there like, wait… this is real?
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