On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.
Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.
Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.
Literally taking food out of the mouths of children. How is this the party of Christians again?
“Fuck them little shits, let em starve: Money is God.”
-Jesus or something idk
So they punish the poor for the actions of the rich. Yep, that makes sense.
The
richlower middle class and up aren’t doing anything wrong here. They’re being offered free lunch and their kids are accepting it.I’d rather all get free lunch if they want it. I’m just simplifying their “logic” in my other post. That even if you accept it at face value, it’s dumb as fuck.
Let all children starve lest one go undeservedly fed.
Here’s a cool thought experiment: if you make all student meals free, how can anyone steal food?
You need to think like a libertarian. “If they’re all getting free food they’re all stealing because taxes are theft.”
No, they actively hate the poor, even when the money is donated freely by the rich to pay for their school lunch.
No no no, if they’re getting all this food free, it’s because the students are the product rather than the customers.
Ya know, I might be onto something with my bullshit…
That was a great read. The Onion meets the New Yorker. But how was it free to read? Did Society pay?
Why the fuck is it so important to you freaks that children don’t eat food?
Does the Devil pay you a dollar everytime a starving kid gets hunger pangs?
Because feeding and supporting children doesn’t get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.
More proof that Republicans don’t care in the slightest about children one they’ve been born.
They care about nobody. What was the last Republican sponsored bill that would objectively make anyone’s life better?
Somehow they have their base frothing at the mouth about these Democrat-led initiatives that help folks (not just Democrats), yet they put forth no proposal to help anyone.
They are the party of taking things away from people not like them, but also the party of taking things away from people just like them. They are not the party of helping anyone. I cannot fathom how the large portion of their base who could be helped by such programs fails to see this.
Even if there are families that “take advantage” (as in, can afford school lunch themselves), so the hell what. It’s just food. Maybe spend a fraction less on the federal defense budget and we could buy them all breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Republicans: Will somebody think of the children?!
Republicans:
If the children are fed, they won’t want to work in the chicken processing plants, have you considered that? What are we going to do, pay adults a living wage to process chickens? Get out of here.
These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things. I wish the worst for them. They’re evil.
I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it’s simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.
So this is especially evil to me.
Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.
A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn’t realize that most of these kids didn’t have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week… Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.
These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things.
This is actually the best argument against what they are doing. I fully support not paying for other kids food when they dont need it, but if we spend a trillion on military every year, they dont care about fiscal conservatism.
I’d MUCH rather STARVE hungry kids so Elon Musk can make a couple extra dollars!
-Save The Children Republicans.
Where are we going to get the money to balance the budget? Out of the mouth of babes, apparently.
I just checked with my k-12 schools. Breakfast is about $2 based on level of schooling, while lunch is around $3. At that point, I kind of wonder if it’s really worth it collecting the money when it probably does little to collect revenue. Just make it easier for everyone.
republicans would force women to birth children but the child would exit the mother by a slide that leads down the hallway and into a giant garbage can full of screaming babies
Republicans hate everyone & everything— except white men
They like the wealthy, most happen to be white males but white men that aren’t rich people that don’t donate to them can use their boot straps. They care about that demographic at elections and most are willing to vote against their interests.
Except white men and controlling the rest, hence the support for a dumb wall
FTA:
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,”
nobody knows more about fraud and abuse than Republicans
“We literally just want to make things worse for everyone involved.”
quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank
As a libertarian, the Cato Institute has a lot of nonsense, and this is one of them.
Here’s my take: if we require students to be in school during certain hours, the school should be obligated to provide everything they need, from supplies to meals. It’s the same idea as with prisons, if we, as a society, decide that certain individuals need to be locked up, they should have their needs provided for. Same thing if we detain someone at custom for hours or whatever.
On the flipside, there should be a way to opt-out for parents who don’t want the school-provided lunches. There are plenty of parents who think school lunches are unhealthy, so perhaps there’s an argument that they should get some kind of cash card to help pay for home-provided meals that’s equivalent to the cost to make the school lunch (like $2-3/lunch). That sounds kind of complicated, so I obviously wouldn’t lead with that, but maybe it’ll resolve some people’s concerns.
If we want to save money (and I think we should), we should shut down a few of our foreign military bases and end federal student loan programs. Those are a lot more expensive than school lunches…
IMO guaranteed child welfare (including universal lunch) is 100% consistent with any major political idealogy that is internally consistent.
Libertarianism? The whole basis is the personal choice, autonomy, and the ethics of consent. Children fundamentally cannot consent. They still, however, individual agents. They simply are in a state where social order defines their outcome. As society, we must then take this to maximize their outcomes and ultimately their personal liberty - when they reach an age where they can operate with it.
Therefore, we have to choose between depriving others of a relatively small resource, or depriving children of a major resource: the nature of their ability to participate with full autonomy and personal liberty.
The choice, in my opinion, is very clear.
Exactly.
I’m a fan of libertarian paternalism, which is all about society choosing good defaults because it’s clear individuals often make poor choices (especially when uninformed). Individuals who can consent or who have the legal responsibility over someone else should be able to choose something different. However, you should also be legally liable for any changes to defaults you make on behalf of someone else (e.g. choosing to forego school lunches for your child and not providing a nutritious meal is theft and abuse).
This is an issue of rights. Until kids can consent, they have a right to proper nutrition and whatnot because they didn’t consent to being brought into the world.
So yeah, the choices are between everyone suffering a minor inconvenience (slightly higher taxes) to guarantee the rights of children, or children suffer. It’s absolutely clear, the minor inconvenience wins.
