Should public schools provide free lunches?

“Shaming Children So Parents Will Pay the School Lunch Bill” (nytimes, 4/30/2017) is interesting for the comments.

Most of the readers express outrage that Big Government is not quite big enough. Also, it is the Trumpenfuhrer’s fault how things are run by local school districts. A sampling:

Donald Trump gets away with $900m unpaid tax bill and yet we are shaming our children for $5 unpaid lunch bill. Go figure.

Some of the $50 billion Trump proposes for military spending would be useful here…

A few of Trump’s weekends in Florida would buy lunches for all the children.

We in the “World’s Richest Country” or the “Greatest Country” shouldn’t ever allow school kids to be shamed or go hungry. What happened to our sense of decency?

If America can afford tax cuts for the richest people, it can afford to drop the idea of cuts — no, just reduce them by the necessary amount — and pay for school lunches. These would not be free lunches, for indeed there is no such thing, but prudent-investment lunches.

I wonder how many of these parents voted for Trump. Desperate and poor, did they vote against themselves and their children? If so, why should I care about them Just askin’ . .

(Maybe we should have free food at schools, but only for kids whose parents can prove that they voted for Hillary and post virtuous messages on Facebook?)

It turns out that collecting the money it itself a painful bureaucratic process:

My daughter is finishing up at a public school. I had to set up a lunch account for her on a special website with a credit card. I had to manage the balance. Even I had trouble. It was a real pain. Now imagine not having internet service at home. Or a credit card. Or having 4 kids to do this for. It is not always just a money issue. Again the school does not accept cash. I can understand not having the money. What I cannot understand is why some schools make it so hard to manage a lunch account.

But where there is painful government bureaucracy there is also profit:

What this article does not mention, and is a big contributor to the student’s family debt, is that many schools now use third party profit making companies to administer these so-called lunch accounts. Companies like mypaymentsplus.com pitch their services to school districts, who then award them the payment administering contract. Those companies, in turn, charge the families service fees (supposedly for the “convenience”) in the neighborhood of 5%. That works out to the equivalent of one meal per month not going to the student, but to a money-making operation instead.

A handful of readers suggest that children and parents could exhibit fiscal responsibility:

No mention of the “brown bag” option? Too rushed in the morning to make a sandwich? Make it the night before. Especially the high school students who are old enough to take responsibility for this simple task.

Here’s an iconoclastic thought: What ever happened to parents packing an inexpensive, nutritious lunch of peanut butter, banana, raisins and carrot sticks? Why pay someone else to do what you should do, then rail about its flaws?

It’s incomprehensible that these parents aren’t packing a lunch for their child to take to school. By the look of these families, they have access to plenty of food.

How is it the school’s fault for not giving children lunch if the child hasn’t paid for it? Should we teach the kids it’s OK to take things from others without money? Should we go a step further and say that you should EXPECT free things in life?

[from a Swedish-American] Parents should be responsible for feeding their children, not schools.

Gina D is, well, there is no polite way to say this… a potential hater:

The tactic is shameful. No question about it. But in this particular case, how many lunches would the nail job and tats have paid for? [Gina was apparently looking at the photos]

Reeducation camp for this gal if she wants to keep living in the Caring Republic of California!

Uh oh, here is a potential Trump voter who snuck into a nytimes subscription:

Whose kids get the humiliation of “lunch debt?” The middle class. The ones whose taxes pay for everyone else’s free lunch. Can you imagine the rage of these parents, who may both be working two jobs to be in the middle class, when they find out that their kid came home hungry because they forgot to pay the lunch bill, or they just didn’t have the cash around when they needed to pay. The current system of means testing just builds resentment among the middle class for the less well off, not to mention prevents some kids who need a free lunch from getting it. Means tested social programs are divisive and short sighted, whether they are for lunch or university tuition. Free lunch for all or free for none.

In Nation of Victims, any time is a good time to talk about one’s victimhood and the enduring scars:

In 1958 a nun (Sister of Charity in southwestern Pa) at my Catholic grade school shamed me because my father was an alcoholic. I have never forgotten that horrible experience.

One interesting aspect of the comments is that a remarkable number of taxpaying citizens seem to be unaware that they are already funding school food to the tune of about $17 billion per year (see this schedule from February 2015). The Federal handouts started life at $70 million in 1947 and grew to $6.1 billion in 2000 (USDA).

What a heartless nation America has become. … What next in modern America? Cut off the air supply of babies whose parents don’t pay taxes?

A very Great America. The president of the country sits on chairs made of gold, but kids can’t get a meal.

What is wrong with us? In other developed nations do children go hungry? One child in five in this country lives in poverty. Yeah, we are number one by a wide margin in developed countries in the percent of childhood poverty.

This is so sad. Philanthropists give tons of money to others in third world countries and Oprah started a school in Africa. What is wrong with taking care of the neediest in our country?

This puts the truth to our moniker as the richest country in the world. [Blake Strack has apparently not looked at this list of countries ranked by per capita GDP.]

[See Canvassing for Elizabeth Warren (2012) for a passionate local liberal who was unaware of the existence of Medicaid, a $486 billion/year program at the time.]

Some people do stay focused long enough to consider the actual food:

Its not as if this lunch food is in any way good for the kids.

From the looks of those in the photos with the article, they could do with missing a few meals. Pizza and chocolate milk ??? When the kid is obese?

Internet lets us hear from Smug Europeans:

I’m happy to be living in a country (Finland) where all children automatically get a free lunch in school, paid for out of public funds, every day of the school year. Nor would the menu include pizza; kids get enough junk food outside school. The lunches are nutritionally well planned, as well as designed to be (mostly) appealing to kids. It’s like single-payer, free or low-cost health care; once you get used to it. you can’t imagine any other way to run things.

[Yes, well, I’m sure it would work great here in the U.S. too… as long as we could import enough Finns to run the whole thing.]

As someone who regularly gets hardcopy bills from government agencies in the mail, typically for $5 to $25 (landing fees at government-run airports), I have a suspicion that administrative costs of collecting lunch money may render the net proceeds negligible (keep in mind that 2/5ths of American children in 2015 qualified for taxpayer-funded lunch and 1/5th for taxpayer-funded breakfast (CNN)).

What about schools teaching fiscal responsibility? Most school districts have buried themselves in explicit debt from new buildings and in implicit debt from pension obligations (just need that 8 percent real return on investment every year for the next 50 years and for every retired schoolteacher to smoke two packs per day; then the numbers will work out!). So they are probably not well-situated to lecture students about paying bills, living within one’s means, etc.

Perhaps the best argument for the current system is that students have an opportunity to learn, at a young age, that working may not be better than collecting welfare. By working at a medium-wage job, in addition to giving up 2000 hours (plus commuting time) per year, a young American will impair his or her opportunity to get a taxpayer-funded house, taxpayer-funded food (SNAP), taxpayer-funded health care, and a taxpayer-funded mobile phone. A daily reminder that families where adults don’t work get cash or cash-equivalents from families where adults do work might be useful input for a young American’s life planning.

My personal idea: Set out an unlimited buffet for all students and teachers, but restrict it to healthful food that nobody really wants to eat: salad, cut vegetables, tofu, brown rice. Nobody goes hungry, nobody gets fatter, and kids who want to eat junk food are motivated to pack a lunch. Even without any revenue, costs to taxpayers will be far lower than under the present system because the idea of eating salad is so terrifying that many more students will bring lunches.