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You can look at stats from NYC: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost-to-provide-free-lunch-for-all-of-new-york-citys-elementary-school-

You can look at stats from NYC: https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost-to-provide-free-lunch-for-all-of-new-york-citys-elementary-school-students.html https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost... The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report. So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.

dahart 1y ago
So maybe $5M on a NY state education budget of nearly $40B, or less than two hundredths of one percent. Isn’t it weird that we pay for everything else but keep the food in a separate accounting budget?
- klodolph 1y ago
  You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades. If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
  - dahart 1y ago
    Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;) I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
    - klodolph 1y ago
      2010s and 2020s are the two different decades. I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%. > I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less. These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
      - dahart 1y ago
        I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
        klodolph 1y ago
        I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015. I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue. The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget. I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
snarf21 1y ago
In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much more complicated thing to calculate and quantify.
- klodolph 1y ago
  I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.
  - ctkhn 1y ago
    the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead). While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral. In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored. This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns. No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service. In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> it would cost more to make it free for everyone That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)

dahart 1y ago

So maybe $5M on a NY state education budget of nearly $40B, or less than two hundredths of one percent. Isn’t it weird that we pay for everything else but keep the food in a separate accounting budget?

klodolph 1y ago
You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades. If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
- dahart 1y ago
  Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;) I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
  - klodolph 1y ago
    2010s and 2020s are the two different decades. I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%. > I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less. These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
    - dahart 1y ago
      I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
      - klodolph 1y ago
        I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015. I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue. The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget. I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.

snarf21 1y ago

In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much more complicated thing to calculate and quantify.

klodolph 1y ago
I agree… and yet “it’s cheap, it’s the right thing to do, and provides massive benefits” is a different argument from “it pays for itself”.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead). While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral. In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored. This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns. No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service. In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> it would cost more to make it free for everyone That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)