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 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…
No, they actively hate the poor, even when the money is donated freely by the rich to pay for their school lunch.
That was a great read. The Onion meets the New Yorker. But how was it free to read? Did Society pay?
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.
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.
Exactly. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes into payment. It’s also another thing that low income parents have to deal with.
The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.
I’d MUCH rather STARVE hungry kids so Elon Musk can make a couple extra dollars!
-Save The Children Republicans.
Oh, no, no, it’s “Think of the Children”! Saving them requires actual effort.
/s
My anti abortion friends will say “the problem is they don’t care about the children after they’re born” and then happily go vote for trump again this Nov because their church told them joe Biden is the devil.
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.
They only succeed through misery, then blame it on those who suffer the most when that misery come to pass
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.
I thought this already happened five or six times over already?
None of the schools I went to had that. And no sane person would’ve wanted to eat that food unless they were starving and hadn’t eaten in 4 weeks.
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.
Split the war budget 50/50, with half going to school lunches and the rest going into guillotines.
“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.”
TIL that a middle class family benefiting from the tax dollars they pay for is ‘fraud’. Since the rich pay no taxes, they have no right to tell us what to do with our own tax dollars. Simple as. Plus, it’s FOOD in the US, we grow so much that NOT diverting some of the extra crops to school lunches is pure waste.
The Panthers need to come back
So when do you think they’ll apply “If any, then none” logic to corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns?
Never? Oh, really then.
The suffering is the point.
corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns
And the military-industrial-complex, which is sort of all-of-the-above, yeah. It’s got waste, corruption, criminality (see Boeing), and “bad finance” (meaning public debt finance of any sort) from top to bottom, through and through, yet Republicans can’t get enough of it. Starving a kid is fighting “socialism”, but starving a socialized military or a
defenseoffense contractor of a penny … now that can’t be tolerated.
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.
Divine rage.
I worked a breakfast grill at a restaurant as a teen and got pretty good at it. I’ll make that kid the most perfect breakfast omelette they’ve ever eaten. And I’ll bring the ingredients if we’re short.
Also worked @a food pantry not long ago, warehouse work mostly but I got to see some of the parents and kids who showed up, long lines out into the northern cold, every day we were open, just to get a day or two’s worth of something to eat.
Anyone who would means-test a kid out of a free school meal, or deny them altogether, is some kind of sociopath monster.
I’ll volunteer if you’re around me lmao
I thought universal meant everyone was entitled it it.
Oh no, do you mean we might accidentally be feeding children who might not need it?
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
