Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

huffpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 918 posts

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

#771

Post by mrguyorama »

nothercastle wrote: post #748
yongjik wrote: post #284

South Korea started dabbling in free school lunches around 2001 - when a few schools started it. It gained momentum, and then it became a huge debate in 2011, when Seoul's mayor somehow decided he hated free lunches so much that he arranged a referendum, and said he would quit if people didn't agree with him on the matter. He did quit. Fast forward to 2025, and now free school lunches are nearly ubiquitous. Once peop…

In America even if we enacted this the kids would get meals that are terrible like 10$ chicken strips, hotdogs and fake pizza

In America this has been the case since at least the 90s. School lunch budgets/prices did not keep up with inflation since the 70s, and increases in the costs of lunch cook labor means the same money does not provide like it used to. Schools have nearly universally converted to reheating the cheapest frozen foodstuffs from whichever supplier provided the best kickback to the board.

Meanwhile kids themselves have participated in the problem. It's common to have several different choices for lunch, with a daily rotating menu "hot" item/meal, or choices of cheap staples like chicken burgers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the worst quality "pizza" you can imagine, think if Domino's found a way to cut their supply costs in half. A shocking amount of children will insist on eating that god awful pizza every single day. I couldn't understand it when I was a kid, and I was super picky at the time!

Michelle Obama wanted to improve this, but she was called a communist and a man and a monkey, and now conservatives all belief this poor quality school lunch problem is her fault? It doesn't actually make any sense.

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

#772

Post by scotty79 »

taxedrollik wrote: post #374
heresjohnny wrote: post #367

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.

50% sounds manageable still. Currently paying ~65% of whatever I bill, in taxes and that hurts quite a lot. Assuming no costs to deliver, I need to bill 10K€ to net ~3,5K€. It makes exports uncompetitive with other lower taxed countries. Despite this, seeing a general practitioner can take months for issues that aren't-killing-you-right-now.

It really doesn't matter how much tax you pay. If everyone pays 65% it's the same as if everyone paid 0. Income tax doesn't come from the pocket of a worker. Employer needs to pay you enough so that you can live your life the way you want to. If he doesn't, you just don't work for him and he has no business. They will pay you as little as they can, but the amount they optimize is the amount after tax.

Economic though is focused around employers and employees but it's the customer that covers the bill down the line. As long as the consumer is healthy you can set tax as high or as low as you want to.

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

#773

Post by scotty79 »

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?

Food is way cheaper than any work. But the way it is today more people can sit in their bullshit jobs and use them as excuse to get money.

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

#774

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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.

> What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.

So... your point is that not feeding the child is neglectful or abusive?

That's basically the position that proponents of free school meals have.

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

#775

Post by kbelder »

kerkeslager wrote: post #372
monero-xmr wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It’s not that I don’t want kids fed. It’s that I know deep in my soul that $100 will be spent per child, with $99 extracted along the way by various politicians / consultants / unions, and $1 of disgusting food will (sometimes) be provided to a child. If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed. If you want th…

>If you oppose any actual steps to feed kids, then you don't want the kids fed. The rest of this is just you justifying why you don't want the kids fed.

Don't be ridiculous. It won't win you any arguments.

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

#776

Post by badlibrarian »

Interesting reading in the linked article beyond the quote.

"In the Reagan administration’s attempt to slash $1.5 billion from children’s nutrition funding, school lunch program requirements were worded (whether deliberately or not) so as to conceivably allow for designating ketchup as a vegetable..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

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

#777

Post by mrguyorama »

giantg2 wrote: post #277
vineyardmike wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like child services should take those children then? This is a HUGE, dangerous leap. > If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care. Plenty of parents (and plenty of people generally) just aren't aware of social services but are quite aware that they're supposed to feed and care for their children. Plenty more forget to fill out paperwork and…

"This is a HUGE, dangerous leap." If you're telling me they are "starving" then it isn't.

I got reduced price lunch for a significant part of my childhood.

My parents weren't bad. My mom was just impoverished. Our society does not pay people what they deserve. Our society pays people as little as possible. That leads to good, well meaning, and talented people who are nevertheless poor.

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

#778

Post by mrguyorama »

walthamstow wrote: post #347
kerkeslager wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this seems like such a dividing line to me. Like, in theory when people believe things that are morally wrong, I want to reach out to them with compassion and respect and try to gently persuade them to my side because we're all, in theory, on the same side. But if you don't want kids to be fed, I really am not sure we're actually on the same side any more and I really am not sure what to do with that.

Even outside of morality it's a straightforward issue. Investments in children benefit the whole economy and society, for decades. If a person can't see that then they could be immoral but they might just be stupid.

Plenty of human beings genuinely and earnestly believe that investing in the "wrong kinds" of people would be harmful to society as a whole. This is not limited to regressives or conservatives either, with plenty of savants on tumbler and reddit reinventing eugenics "against rich people this time".

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

#779

Post by gamblor956 »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #720
idrios wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wealthy do use public schools. They pay huge amounts to live in upper class neighborhoods with wealthy peers, where a lot of tax money goes into the schooling system so the kids can take all sorts of extracurriculars and AP classes. It gets the same results as private school but the cost comes from living in that neighborhood rather than paying the school directly

California actually has a pretty solid school tax-redistribition system that more or less solves this problem (of course districts still can and do fundraise for direct donations to the PTA/music fund and bond measures to upgrade facilities, but it's still vastly more fair). In a completely unrelated phenomenon, private schools are incredibly popular among Californians of means.

Most wealthy people in CA don't send their kid to private school. That's a rarity even among the wealthy.

There are plenty of good public schools in CA. There are only a handful of good private ones.

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

#780

Post by redwall_hp »

exitb wrote: post #371
oulipo wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My dad believed that because he paid taxes he shouldn’t have to pay the school to feed me." I understand this is not what is meant here... but in a sense he's right. In a normal society where everyone pay taxes and they are well spent, it should be indeed the Government that's in charge of feeding kids at school

Taxes aren't magic, you pay some money and receive some services. It's obviously possible to fund meals with tax money, but would he accept a higher tax rate to cover for it?

I would accept one fewer aircraft carrier to fund school lunches for the foreseeable future.

Also, food cost is effectively artificial. We literally pay farmers not to farm to keep prices viable for market games. Instead of doing that, the government could buy a fraction of athe excess for school systems.

And yes, I'd accept taxes on par with non-trashfire countries if they resulted in the society and services of those countries.

Post reply on HN