Yes, there is "lack of school supplies", but not for lack of money. It's malice or incompetence, probably both. Imagine that you are a school administrator. If

Yes, there is "lack of school supplies", but not for lack of money. It's malice or incompetence, probably both. Imagine that you are a school administrator. If you save money, your budget will get reduced since you obviously don't need it. If you spend the money on pens and paper, things will function OK and people won't vote to increase property taxes. If you blow the money on something else, so that you run out of money for pens and paper, you'll get sympathy and maybe more money. Well, the solution is obvious. You need to engineer the budget so that you can't afford pens and paper. Buy a new mural. Replace perfectly functional carpeting in your office. Use up the paper by sending junk mail home with the kids. Replace the landscaping. Hire your cousin to seal the pavement. Paper is $0.011 per page. Pens are $0.0865 each. It costs just $55.17 to give each student a new pen and 20 sheets of paper every single day for the entire school year. California spends over $20,000 per student. DC spends somewhere between $27,000 and $29,000 per student per year. Just 0.19% to 0.28% of the budget is enough to fund that wasteful amount of pens and paper. Comparison shouldn't be limited to the USA. Budgets in the USA are way above international norms, even ignoring the poor countries.