this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Interesting. I personally support Universal School Breakfasts / Lunches but what the Republicans want to do here isn't quite as heinous as the headline would have you believe.
You can read the RSC Budget here (PDF Warning) and can find the School Lunch thing on page 34.
What Republicans want is to eliminate CEP in order to force Means Testing for Free / Reduced School lunch. Government Auditors have apparently found a fair bit of fraud in the program and in this case fraud is people who are outside the financial guidelines who have lied about their income in order to get free or reduced cost lunches. The School Districts are complicit with this because the more students they have on the free / reduced lunch program the more federal money they get. You can a lot of that info from the in document citation number 144 which takes you here.
I was surprised to learn that the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Agency in charge of School Meals, spends more than 20 Billion dollars a year on this! There's a great non-partisan Congressional Report on this that you can read here. (PDF Warning).
Solution: Eliminate the means test and give every kid lunch and breakfast.
But-but surely that would cost more than constantly policing people to make sure they aren’t cheating?!
NARRATOR: It does not.
Even if it costs more, it saves time and money for parents who don’t meet the means test.
To be clear, I would happily support it even if it did cost more. But the fact it doesn’t makes it all too clear that the cruelty is the point.
That is exactly what my blood-red county did.
Also, your source for fraud in the school lunch program comes from a site that advocates canceling all federal food aid programs, including WIC, food stamps, etc, as well as shutting down the Department of Education entirely, so, yeah, a little bit of a bias there. 🤮
It isn't "my" source. It's taken directly from the RSC Budget document. I even specified the citation number and page.
I understand the bias issue you are raising but you need to understand that they didn't come up with that fraud number, the GAO did. If you look at that section they (again not me, they) have citation number 41 which will take you to the actual GAO Report that was done during the Obama Administration.
In 2012 the USDA itself estimated that there was nearly 1 Billion dollars of "NSLP certification errors". The report used "NSLP certification errors" while the RSC Budget referred it as "fraud" but it amounts to the same thing, people using the benefits who would have been financially ineligible if closer tracking and means testing was being performed.
Unsurprisingly the USDA itself concluded that in order to stop the certification errors that they'd need to implement income verification...so that the means testing rules could actually be implemented.
So what you are seeing in regards to Free / Reduced Student Meals is that the Federal Government itself, under a Democratic President, saw that there was an issue to be addressed.
Republicans want to address the issue by giving the means testing some teeth. I would prefer that they fix it by making it universally free for all students all the time. We see the same problem, we just have different solutions.
Which literally just ultimately harms children. Parents commit fraud to get their kids free lunch? Now the kids get to starve and potentially be forced into the foster care system that is rife with abuse.
If the parents are committing fraud because they make too much money to qualify for the program wouldn't that mean if the parents were exposed then denied program benefits they would have enough money to feed their kids anyways?
I guess I don't understand why it means kids would starve? Is the assumption the parents are evil negligible people who will refuse to feed their children if they can't cheat the system to have their kids fed for free?
Parents who need the help still get the help and kids still eat. Parents who lied about needing the help will no longer get it and feed their kids themselves so kids still eat.
Where is starvation coming into play? And where has your foster care comment come from? I don't understand.
Very likely not. Often means testing ignores context. Like, for example, they may technically make enough money to disqualify but have medical or student debt.
There's a history in the US of lunches being physically taken away from students in such situations as well as denying diplomas for "lunch debt".
If this were approached like other efforts, like Florida's LGBTQ+ suppression laws, it may be explicitly part of the law. Otherwise, if it carries a sentence involving jail time, it would be an implicit one.
You defended the republicans so that makes you hate trans people/s
But seriously now, its fucked up that you are getting downvoted and bashed for calling out the lies of the article.
Rigth now it shows very much that theres a lot of people that are very on board with that line of thinking.
I have no idea why this has been hapening so much recently. If you even sugest that people should work thogeter, regardles of what groups of people you are talking about, it inmediatly gets defaulted by some asshole into their american blue vs red bullshit culture wars, and start attacking you.
I know that doesnt have much to do with this case but what im trying to get across is that theres a lot of people eager to label you their enemy and fight you, regardles of the subject at hand.
And while im aware that most of the new lemmy users are mostly reddit lefty americans, i dont recall them being this rabid befor, i have a theory that the partisian shills have goten to lemmy recently, be it any 3 lether agency or just political campaing hires, but the ambience has been stinkingly more fish rothen recently.
My recomendation is to dont try to reason with these guys since not only they dont deserve it and are not going to listen, but they to are here just to shit on you. So just move on.
First, food should be a right.
Second, conservatives and neoliberals love to scream about fraud and abuse of welfare programs, with or without justification, so when I hear somebody claiming that the eeeeeevil public school system is collaborating with eeeeeevil poor people to defraud honest American taxpayers, and I know that conservatives loathe the public school system as much as they loathe poor people, I just roll my eyes.
Third, means testing is not just spiteful and evil, it's routinely used as a weapon to destroy welfare programs, entitlement programs, and social services in general. It's why Republicans keep bringing up means testing social security. When you impose means testing to limit the number of people who directly benefit from a program, you create a division between "us" (the people who pay for a program with taxes) and "them" (poor people who benefit from the program and presumably don't pay taxes). And when a program only benefits poor people it's much easier to stigmatize and ultimately eliminate it.
Fourth, food should be a right.
Fifth, when it comes to what people can actually afford, total income on paper is only one factor - plenty of people with high total income still struggle to buy food for their kids. And frankly I'm not going to second guess people who say they need help paying for their kids' food.
Sixth, you realize I'm posting this on an anarchist instance, right? I suspect very few users here think lying to the government to feed your kids is particularly heinous.
Finally, in case you didn't hear me before, food should be a right.
You are welcome to smear children eating lunch as welfare cheats wasting taxpayer money all you like. And you wouldn't be alone in doing that. But I would ask you to spend some time thinking about the moral implications of making that argument before you distribute it further.
No, I didn't realize that slrpnk was an anarchist instance. I'm commenting from a general instance known as lemmy.today. I am curious though why anarchists are supporting a Government, isn't that kind of against your political beliefs?
Otherwise you can take the personal shots at me and toss them out the window. They can lie their there on the ground next to your reading comprehension.
https://lemmy.today/comment/1504729
Frankly, when you say you support universal school lunches, but then write paragraphs about how greedy parents are abusing the system to get their kids free lunches, how public schools are complicit in this fraud because increasing the number of kids getting free lunches increases their lunch budget, and how surprised you are by how much the school lunch program costs taxpayers - basically all the standard Republican talking points for abolishing school lunches - and one of your links goes back to a ultraconservative website that calls for abolishing the Department of Education entirely, it makes me doubt that your support for universal school lunches is sincere.
I mean, look, what you're complaining about is fraud in means testing. People claiming free lunches when they have too much income to be eligible for free lunches. But what we're talking about is schools where means testing does not happen because everyone gets free lunch. Republicans are looking at schools where universal free lunches are currently implemented. And they're saying they want to go back to means testing so that parents with higher incomes can't defraud the system. But if there is no income requirement for free school lunches then nobody is lying about their income to get free school lunches. All your "studies" about parents lying about their income and public schools encouraging parents to lie about their income to get more federal funding are completely irrelevant to the universal programs that the Republicans are trying to cancel. You can't have fraud in means testing when there's no means testing. You can't have public schools padding their free lunch enrollment when everyone is in free lunch by default.
You get it? Let's assume there's lots of fraud when free school lunches are means tested. I don't believe it, but let's assume it. But if free school lunches are universal and not means tested, there can't be any fraud. So Republicans are saying "look, let's add income requirements to a program that doesn't have income requirements, because then we can do means testing and find lots of fraud". And why do they want to find lots of fraud? So then they can point at "objective" studies like the ones you cited and use them as excuses to abolish free school lunch programs.
I may be too hair trigger and not giving you the benefit of the doubt. I admit my own biases. I went for entire weeks at a time where those free school breakfasts and lunches were the only thing I had to eat and I react poorly to attempts to abolish them or further penalize their recipients.
And for your part, however, you should recognize that giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt when it comes to welfare programs - specifically, accepting their claims that they're just trying to fight fraud and abuse in the system - is not typically warranted.
I spent most of Junior High on Free Lunches and eating Government Cheese at home. I get it.
Well said 👏
When did they smear children eating lunch as welfare cheats?
They literally said they support universal lunches? Did you not read what they wrote?
what is the amount of money you think is appropriate to spend on ensuring children don't starve in school?
Literally whatever it takes. Why are so many of you unable to understand that I was directly citing the provided sources and not offering my own opinion?
Further why are so many of you skipping my 2nd sentence where I clearly state my opinion which is, and I quote, "I personally support Universal School Breakfasts / Lunches..."?
This is the kind of unthinking knee-jerk neo-liberal brain death that infests almost every political discussion anywhere on the WWW these days. No one is comprehending a damn thing that they are reading. People just knee jerk their metaphorical foot directly into their metaphorical mouth.