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.
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...
Did someone call the Libertarian PD?
That was a great read. The Onion meets the New Yorker. But how was it free to read? Did Society pay?