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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.
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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.
I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.
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…
I don't know what the correct answer is. 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. So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Embarrassing the kid ideally would not be part o…
One is whether kids should get fed.
The other is how this is paid for.
The approach of "the child is charged like anyone else buying a thing and hopefully their parents have given them money" is easy but has obvious problems that we're talking about.
However we can split these problems up, one is saying that we will just feed the kids as a flat statement. Then the problem is how to pay for it.
You could have state level taxes, but that's not the only option. On the other end of the spectrum you could send a bill to the parents - this is at its core the same as charging the kids in the best case but avoids issues where people don't give the kids the money. You could do that but have programs to only charge the more fortunate. You could do it by taxes on income, you could do it by income but only if you have kids. You could do it with property taxes.
All have various benefits and drawbacks, as what's "fair" is arguable.
However that is all distinct from whether the kids get fed.
> The thing about witnessing a 7-year-old having their hot lunch tray yanked away and replaced with a cold sandwich It's bizarre that this happens in America.
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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.
> ... and school lunches should be free (from a EU country, this isn’t even a thing here) I'm from another EU country (the Netherlands). Primary schools do not provide any lunch or other food whatsoever, secondary schools might have a canteen selling some snacks or low quality fast food. But everyone is basically expected to bring their own or go out/home for lunch.
Another time, a teacher paid for a student's meal because he lost the change he was given by his parents to buy food from the canteen.
And another time, the school canteen just giving away free food at the end of the day to whoever wanted it, because there was no point in them keeping it around.
It's honestly unbelievable that a first world country would let its children go without lunch because even third world countries do not let that happen. I have seen schools in rural Africa that don't let their children starve - in fact, giving a midday meal (and some to take home afterwards) is a way to ensure school attendance.
As someone from Europe, I had heard before about bankrupting ambulance rides, slavery in prisons, and food deserts. I did not expect to add “lunch money humiliation ritual” to that list. I’ll think of this next time I complain about my 50% income tax.
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I'm not sure where to even begin with this, but a large part of why free school lunches exist is that there are many kids in abusive or simply desperately poor families who do not get fed properly, meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get. > Not giving people free things is not a punishment. This is absurd. Kids don't have money to purchase what they need, so parents have a duty to feed, clo…
>meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustain…
> But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family.
I'd like to live in a society where we extend this duty to the society. It is the parent's duty foremost, but we as a society should see this as our duty as well, at the very least for our children (and let's think of it that way, we are in this together, at least when it comes to our children).
> A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.
I'm with you as far as the principle of personal responsibility is concerned, we are all better when everyone contributes, and I agree that we should teach our children this principle. However, the whole reason that, even legally, we don't treat kids as adults is that they are not adults, cannot and should not be held to the same standards. Withholding the basic necessities of life is not the way to teach this principle.
It doesn't even work consistently. I'd argue that many of the people that are fraudulently taking advantage of welfare programs are doing so because they were taught, as kids, that society doesn't care about them. So why should they care about us? Why shouldn't they take advantage of whatever they can? I'm not justifying this position, or even saying it is logically sound, but kids are not adults. If withholding school lunches is your method for "teaching responsibility" it is really ineffective.
Just feed the kids. We're not giving them free Xboxes. We're keeping them healthy and alive so that they can learn.
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…
> 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 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 r…
Outliers will be everywhere, you only have to select the right ones, and not fix an entire suburbs culture, and ofc the obligatory: tax the rich.
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…
Even if you want to look at it from a purely selfish point of view... if you want to live in a good, prosperous society, this starts with childrens education. A well fed, happy, well slept child is an ideal here to get them the best education they can. Not wanting each child to get the best possible start in life makes absolutely no sense to me. But yes, no child should go hungry at school.
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…
Couldn't you have taken a packed lunch in? Make a sandwich and take it with you.