this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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United States | News & Politics

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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.

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[–] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 63 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 55 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So they punish the poor for the actions of the rich. Yep, that makes sense.

[–] pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The ~~rich~~ lower middle class and up aren’t doing anything wrong here. They’re being offered free lunch and their kids are accepting it.

[–] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 52 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 18 points 8 months ago (4 children)

You need to think like a libertarian. "If they're all getting free food they're all stealing because taxes are theft."

[–] whereisk@lemmy.world 16 points 8 months ago

No, they actively hate the poor, even when the money is donated freely by the rich to pay for their school lunch.

[–] Mango@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

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...

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[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 42 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Why the fuck is it so important to you freaks that children don't eat food?

[–] Alsephina@lemmy.ml 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] HawlSera@lemm.ee 10 points 8 months ago

Does the Devil pay you a dollar everytime a starving kid gets hunger pangs?

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 10 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] Kata1yst@kbin.social 10 points 8 months ago

Cruelty is the point.

[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

More proof that Republicans don't care in the slightest about children one they've been born.

[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 15 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 25 points 8 months ago

Cheat Sheet:

Is it good? Republicans will want to ban it.

[–] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Healthcare: $300b

Infrastructure: $150b

School lunches: $15m

War: $69,420b

Someone who's good at the economy help me budget this. My country is dying.

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[–] PlainSimpleGarak@lemm.ee 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Liz@midwest.social 20 points 8 months ago

I just plain think school should provide free lunch anyway. The kids are forced to be there, might as well feed 'em.

[–] Audrey0nne@leminal.space 22 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Experts on defrauding public services offer insight that public services are easily defrauded but are mum on any solutions that would make it harder to defraud public services. The math maths.

[–] thurstylark@lemm.ee 10 points 8 months ago

That's because the problem from their perspective is that the people who would defraud public services exist, and their rage is high enough that they accept the people who simply use public services as collateral damage.

Bah, who am I kidding... They don't care about humans. They're just interested in that money going towards private businesses (Especially if they have a generous lobbyist from and/or stake in said business or industry)

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[–] Alsephina@lemmy.ml 19 points 8 months ago

"We literally just want to make things worse for everyone involved."

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Republicans: Will somebody think of the children?!

Republicans:

[–] jkrtn@lemmy.ml 9 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] pingveno@lemmy.ml 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] SSJ2Marx@hexbear.net 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.

[–] pingveno@lemmy.ml 9 points 8 months ago

Exactly. There's a lot of infrastructure that goes into payment. It's also another thing that low income parents have to deal with.

[–] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 8 points 8 months ago

The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.

[–] AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things. I wish the worst for them. They're evil.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] CommunistBear@hexbear.net 17 points 8 months ago

The Panthers need to come back bpp

[–] BigMacHole@lemm.ee 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'd MUCH rather STARVE hungry kids so Elon Musk can make a couple extra dollars!

-Save The Children Republicans.

[–] CharlesReed@kbin.social 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Oh, no, no, it's "Think of the Children"! Saving them requires actual effort.

/s

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[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago

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

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 12 points 8 months ago

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

[–] Hexbear2@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago

U.S. will give billions of dollars to support genocide, but won't feed it's own children. We've surpassed biblical levels of evil.

[–] Juice@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Do it.

I will start a free lunch program the next fucking day, I have a whole city full of fucking commies ready to go, I will feed your babies bellies delicious food and I will feed their minds revolutionary proletarian theory. I will teach their parents about Marx and Lenin and Fanon, Luxemburg and Kwame Ture. and we will take this shit over.

Ideologically driven psychos forget how this shit started in the first place. We remember.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'll volunteer if you're around me lmao

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[–] DogPeePoo@lemm.ee 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Republicans hate everyone & everything— except white men

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[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago

If feeding kids is a red line then there are no red lines.

[–] TheJims@lemmy.world 9 points 8 months ago

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

[–] StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Here’s a link to the actual press release which contains links both to the actual budget as well as paragraph by paragraph summaries.

http://rsc-hern.house.gov/media/press-releases/rsc-releases-fy25-budget-proposal-fiscal-sanity-save-america

[–] ferralcat@monyet.cc 6 points 8 months ago

The line "Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs" just cracks me up. "People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don't like".

[–] ferralcat@monyet.cc 6 points 8 months ago

Thi budget has the word "Biiden" in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words "woke ideology". Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

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...

[–] ferralcat@monyet.cc 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Fun fact, some places do force inmates to pay for their own incarceration and will hand you a bill when you leave https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-of-states-allow-people-to-be-charged-for-time-behind-bars

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[–] Robert7301201@slrpnk.net 6 points 8 months ago (11 children)

I see a big problem with the opt-out being abusive parents could pocket the money without feeding the child.

Money isn't the only barrier to food security.

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[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 5 points 8 months ago

Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?

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