7 ms·

It's astonishing this is a thing. I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free with no questions asked. Where I live, kids can ge

It's astonishing this is a thing. I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free with no questions asked. Where I live, kids can get breakfast too, however I've heard that isn't universal in the state. The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here that are suffering. I have a brother with disabilities and there are "lines" drawn all the time with funding that are either all or nothing. If you cross a line, you lose funding. It encourages them to work less, save less money, and be more reliant on state funding. Why haven't we figured out gradients yet? For example, above this line you get 90% of costs covered. Above this line 80%. Above this line 70%. etc... etc... etc...

candiddevmike 1y ago
During COVID, school lunch was free, and most school served free bag lunches over the summer too. That ended in June 2022. Congress could've kept it going for a pittance, but alas...
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  That's what happened in MA. It was COVID that started the program and then we kept it up because we're decent people.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    A lot of the country, majorities in many states, are not decent people.
- humanrebar 1y ago
  State government, local government, and local philanthropy (like the chamber of commerce, etc.) could also buy lunch. I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.
- tecirpinslime 1y ago
  My significant other work at a school during Covid where they were giving free breakfasts and lunches. The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in. The staff always wanted to err on the side of caution, because they didn’t want any kids to miss out. We’re talking sometimes over 200 lunches that were discarded in a day. Some things could be reused, but a lot was thrown away. It was against the rules to do anything but either give them to a student, or throw them away.
  - mjevans 1y ago
    It sounds like there were a few problems identified. * Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window) * Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable * No system of reservation to try to forecast load There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      These problems aren't easy to solve. The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well. The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten". The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.
      - Suppafly 1y ago
        >The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well. This, food waste is built into the system. It'd be nice if it wasn't but every restaurant and cafeteria throws away just as much food as they sell, most people just don't realize it because they've never worked in food service.
- newAccount2025 1y ago
  It was a really nice time. One less chore to worry about every night.
- rufus_foreman 1y ago
  This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever. Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes. No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs. I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
  - gs17 1y ago
    >to deal with temporary problems Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.
vlovich123 1y ago
[flagged]
- SamBam 1y ago
  Except it does the opposite, because it disincentives you from raising your income above that line.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    The goal isn’t to make it easy for you to escape the system but more difficult under the theory that then you’re more self sufficient. It’s a stupid philosophy of course.
    - humanrebar 1y ago
      Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes. The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.
      - apercu 1y ago
        > everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).
        dani__german 1y ago
        Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver. https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-haynes-2056357 https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn... If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?
- SamBam 1y ago
  The cost of living isn't a single number. A state like Massachusetts, with a high cost of living for people with high income living in or near Boston, can also have large social services, like subsidized housing, good-quality public education, free healthcare, and free school lunches. It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
- mbfg 1y ago
  the cool thing about cost of living is taxes tend to track cost of living, so the ability for government to pay for school lunches is likely similar anywhere.
  - criddell 1y ago
    In Texas, schools are primarily funded through property taxes. That means wealthy neighborhoods have well funded schools that can easily afford free lunches, poor neighborhoods do not.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      The thing I find more hilarious even than the -4 that my original comment got, is that I wasn't talking about taxes, but "cost of living". I was under the mistaken impression that the term refers to the cost of groceries, housing, fuel, utilities, and so forth, rather than taxes. But I must have touched a nerve. Guess they don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing. No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.
- runako 1y ago
glitchc 1y ago
Gradients would impose a significant burden on the bureaucracy. It's already complicated enough to figure out where a person's unique circumstances place them on various thresholds. Add gradients and the complexity grows exponentially. The net result would be a 100x increase in the number of public servants.
- interactivecode 1y ago
  why? income number input results in output number of support. or you know it could just be a of their part time income % with a fixed min and max. or something like a reverse income tax.
- _dark_matter_ 1y ago
  100x? I think this deserves a bit of a deeper insight. The inputs are the same, which means the verification steps are also exactly the same. The only change might be volume, but I highly doubt it would be 100x. Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  I don't think you should be getting downvoted, you are right. I don't think it's "100x more", but more complicated rules require more resources dedicated to their management. It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste. The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 1y ago
  Gradients can impose a burden, but they can also be simple enough to just "run with" - and many of them that are already gradient-based are. They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.
GarnetFloride 1y ago
Haven't you met people who refused a raise because they were scared of moving to a new tax bracket? Same thing only this is where it actually happens.
- SSJPython 1y ago
  The only people that do this are ones that have no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Which is a surprisingly large percentage of the population. Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free. Most people like receiving a big fat refund. Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.
  - ponector 1y ago
    Is it? There are situations where it makes sense to avoid a rise and stay in the tax bracket. Like if with 5k rise you loose a 10k childcare benefits provided by local municipality.
    - maxerickson 1y ago
      Yes, the anecdote about misunderstanding a particular thing may be broken if you introduce additional factors. The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.
    - Suppafly 1y ago
      That's not tax brackets though, that's income. Talking about tax brackets is weirdly indirect way to talk about income. The people who avoid raises because they think they'll be taxed higher on all their income because they don't understand how brackets work aren't the same people who avoid raises because it'll cause them to earn too much to be eligible for government assistance programs.
jacknews 1y ago
"It's astonishing this is a thing." Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.
- ponector 1y ago
  Free education means no one will value it. Education should not be free, just cheap. However there should be help and assistance to people who wants to get an education but cannot afford it. Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
  - jacknews 1y ago
    "Free education means no one will value it" Ridiculous. Of course, if it's free, then it's just the default, and some people will strive to be better than 'the masses' and pay for private education. But in any case, your whole society gets decently educated, which makes everyone richer, in every way.
    - ponector 1y ago
      I'm from a country where university degree can be easily obtained for free. As a result: 1. Students usually are not interested in attending classes, like at the middle school. 2. Bachelor/masters degrees means nothing as everyone has one.
      - jacknews 1y ago
        There's a big difference between 'degree for free' and 'education for free' I think. One is just worthless paper, the other is equal opportunity for everyone to actually attain the standard required for a degree.
        ponector 1y ago
dredmorbius 1y ago
Gradients introduce a tremendous measurement problem. It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth). This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system. There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  Oh, and there's the deadweight loss of those who would qualify for a benefit (under law) but fail either to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops, or who do hoop-jump, but are still denied benefits, whether through bureaucratic error, inefficiency, corruption, or other reasons. TFA describes the first circumstance. Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well: Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>). Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24-hermit-kingdom-simpler-times-d32d54f10415 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...> Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing. I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-testing-and-its-limits https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>). I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where: - It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate. - Where resources and/or services offered are limited. Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.
kbelder 1y ago
And there may be many unrelated programs that fully cut funding at nearly the same level, making it a compounding problem. You might lose several benefits the moment your household income moves from 149% of poverty level to 151%, for instance. But, also, that's because there isn't one monolithic agency that's in charge of all benefits... and that may be a good thing.

candiddevmike 1y ago

During COVID, school lunch was free, and most school served free bag lunches over the summer too. That ended in June 2022. Congress could've kept it going for a pittance, but alas...

thinkingtoilet 1y ago
That's what happened in MA. It was COVID that started the program and then we kept it up because we're decent people.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  A lot of the country, majorities in many states, are not decent people.
humanrebar 1y ago
State government, local government, and local philanthropy (like the chamber of commerce, etc.) could also buy lunch. I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.
tecirpinslime 1y ago
My significant other work at a school during Covid where they were giving free breakfasts and lunches. The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in. The staff always wanted to err on the side of caution, because they didn’t want any kids to miss out. We’re talking sometimes over 200 lunches that were discarded in a day. Some things could be reused, but a lot was thrown away. It was against the rules to do anything but either give them to a student, or throw them away.
- mjevans 1y ago
  It sounds like there were a few problems identified. * Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window) * Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable * No system of reservation to try to forecast load There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    These problems aren't easy to solve. The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well. The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten". The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.
    - Suppafly 1y ago
      >The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well. This, food waste is built into the system. It'd be nice if it wasn't but every restaurant and cafeteria throws away just as much food as they sell, most people just don't realize it because they've never worked in food service.
newAccount2025 1y ago
It was a really nice time. One less chore to worry about every night.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever. Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes. No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs. I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
- gs17 1y ago
  >to deal with temporary problems Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.

vlovich123 1y ago

[flagged]

SamBam 1y ago
Except it does the opposite, because it disincentives you from raising your income above that line.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  The goal isn’t to make it easy for you to escape the system but more difficult under the theory that then you’re more self sufficient. It’s a stupid philosophy of course.
  - humanrebar 1y ago
    Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes. The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.
    - apercu 1y ago
      > everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).
      - dani__german 1y ago
        Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver. https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-haynes-2056357 https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn... If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

>I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?

SamBam 1y ago
The cost of living isn't a single number. A state like Massachusetts, with a high cost of living for people with high income living in or near Boston, can also have large social services, like subsidized housing, good-quality public education, free healthcare, and free school lunches. It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
mbfg 1y ago
the cool thing about cost of living is taxes tend to track cost of living, so the ability for government to pay for school lunches is likely similar anywhere.
- criddell 1y ago
  In Texas, schools are primarily funded through property taxes. That means wealthy neighborhoods have well funded schools that can easily afford free lunches, poor neighborhoods do not.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    The thing I find more hilarious even than the -4 that my original comment got, is that I wasn't talking about taxes, but "cost of living". I was under the mistaken impression that the term refers to the cost of groceries, housing, fuel, utilities, and so forth, rather than taxes. But I must have touched a nerve. Guess they don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing. No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.
runako 1y ago

glitchc 1y ago

Gradients would impose a significant burden on the bureaucracy. It's already complicated enough to figure out where a person's unique circumstances place them on various thresholds. Add gradients and the complexity grows exponentially. The net result would be a 100x increase in the number of public servants.

interactivecode 1y ago
why? income number input results in output number of support. or you know it could just be a of their part time income % with a fixed min and max. or something like a reverse income tax.
_dark_matter_ 1y ago
100x? I think this deserves a bit of a deeper insight. The inputs are the same, which means the verification steps are also exactly the same. The only change might be volume, but I highly doubt it would be 100x. Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
lynndotpy 1y ago
I don't think you should be getting downvoted, you are right. I don't think it's "100x more", but more complicated rules require more resources dedicated to their management. It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste. The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 1y ago
Gradients can impose a burden, but they can also be simple enough to just "run with" - and many of them that are already gradient-based are. They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.

GarnetFloride 1y ago

Haven't you met people who refused a raise because they were scared of moving to a new tax bracket? Same thing only this is where it actually happens.

SSJPython 1y ago
The only people that do this are ones that have no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Which is a surprisingly large percentage of the population. Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free. Most people like receiving a big fat refund. Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.
- ponector 1y ago
  Is it? There are situations where it makes sense to avoid a rise and stay in the tax bracket. Like if with 5k rise you loose a 10k childcare benefits provided by local municipality.
  - maxerickson 1y ago
    Yes, the anecdote about misunderstanding a particular thing may be broken if you introduce additional factors. The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    That's not tax brackets though, that's income. Talking about tax brackets is weirdly indirect way to talk about income. The people who avoid raises because they think they'll be taxed higher on all their income because they don't understand how brackets work aren't the same people who avoid raises because it'll cause them to earn too much to be eligible for government assistance programs.

jacknews 1y ago

"It's astonishing this is a thing." Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.

ponector 1y ago
Free education means no one will value it. Education should not be free, just cheap. However there should be help and assistance to people who wants to get an education but cannot afford it. Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
- jacknews 1y ago
  "Free education means no one will value it" Ridiculous. Of course, if it's free, then it's just the default, and some people will strive to be better than 'the masses' and pay for private education. But in any case, your whole society gets decently educated, which makes everyone richer, in every way.
  - ponector 1y ago
    I'm from a country where university degree can be easily obtained for free. As a result: 1. Students usually are not interested in attending classes, like at the middle school. 2. Bachelor/masters degrees means nothing as everyone has one.
    - jacknews 1y ago
      There's a big difference between 'degree for free' and 'education for free' I think. One is just worthless paper, the other is equal opportunity for everyone to actually attain the standard required for a degree.
      - ponector 1y ago

dredmorbius 1y ago

Gradients introduce a tremendous measurement problem. It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth). This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system. There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)

dredmorbius 1y ago
Oh, and there's the deadweight loss of those who would qualify for a benefit (under law) but fail either to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops, or who do hoop-jump, but are still denied benefits, whether through bureaucratic error, inefficiency, corruption, or other reasons. TFA describes the first circumstance. Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well: Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>). Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24-hermit-kingdom-simpler-times-d32d54f10415 https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...> Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing. I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-testing-and-its-limits https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>). I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where: - It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate. - Where resources and/or services offered are limited. Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.

kbelder 1y ago

And there may be many unrelated programs that fully cut funding at nearly the same level, making it a compounding problem. You might lose several benefits the moment your household income moves from 149% of poverty level to 151%, for instance. But, also, that's because there isn't one monolithic agency that's in charge of all benefits... and that may be a good thing.