7 ms·

I don't know what the correct answer is. The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of payin

by mlyle 1y ago

I don't know what the correct answer is. The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Embarrassing the kid ideally would not be part of it. California pays for it all, but California is a pretty rich state. And if you're a poorer state, you have the choice between eliminating this problem, or addressing many other types of educational need.

mtnGoat 1y ago
Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. This is not a political issue in my mind, but a basic humanity issue. A child with hunger pangs isn’t focused on learning, if you can’t cover the basic need, the rest is a waste. The haves, selfishly don’t want to help subsidize the have nots. Which I get, BUT these are kids, we as adults should leave them out of it, sack up, and deal with it. You are correct, my dad was a civil engineer, he very much could afford it. I guess he thought high end alcohol and golf were better expenditures. I found it interesting that the article mentions a lot of the debt isn’t from the lowest income brackets.
- gopalv 1y ago
  > Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. It's what my district does and the benefits are obvious - there's no "gimme your lunch money" kids who have it hard at home & trying to supplement their diets. The school even hands out a free breakfast, which serves as monitored childcare for the parents who need to drop their kids off before 8 AM, to get to work. The highschool also gives out double servings for kids who come off the morning sports practice sessions. The cynic in me says the biggest beneficiary will be the US Army, who can reliably look for a stream of well fed kids from families which aren't doing well enough to pay for college.
hiddencost 1y ago
This is why we have taxes. Because we can assess how much each person can afford to pay, and then make collective decisions that can't be made by inefficient free market mechanisms.
- t0bia_s 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - iamflimflam1 1y ago
    That’s a big leap from the comment you are replying to.
    - t0bia_s 1y ago
      Please, explain.
      - ta1243 1y ago
        You pay taxes for the military right? And for roads? And for the police? And the courts? And for the schools themselves. Is that socialism?
        t0bia_s 1y ago
        You took money from people involuntary and relocate. Technically, yes.
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    As someone whose family fled from the ex-socialist state of Yugoslavia (well I guess the state itself was socialist, and the ex- part applies to the country itself, but you get what I mean) - who is very much against socialism - this is an absurd connection to make. We're talking about making sure kids have something to eat at the school they go to every day, not giving the workers the means of production. Not everything has to have a profit incentive, and not everything that doesn't make profit can be classed as socialism.
mrweasel 1y ago
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. I quite frankly don't care about that type of arguments anymore. If someone wants to be a bad person they are free to do so. I don't care, it should not stop the 95%, or more, that want to do the right thing. We continuously make more and more convoluted rules, which are a nightmare for decent people to navigate, but which are just ignored by the assholes. I don't care about fighting the assholes for what is minor amounts, if it means overburdening good people with rules which weren't meant for them anyway. Moving it to taxes essentially does the same thing. The assholes weasel their way out of paying their fair share, while those who want the best for society and everyone is stuck paying the full amount.
mulmen 1y ago
> I don't know what the correct answer is. I do. > The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. It isn't tricky. It's taxes. There's not nuance here. There's only hate and spite for those less fortunate.
nucleardog 1y ago
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. I say this as an IT worker making what most would consider an absurd amount of money and pays 0.55*absurd money in taxes, a dad, a human, etc... what the fuck does any of this matter. If a child is hungry, the only concern is feeding that child. A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves. If their parents fail to care for them, we have various mechanisms for the state to step in in their stead up to and including taking them away and giving them to someone else. "Sorry, Johnny, your dad has the money to pay for lunch but chose not to so we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up." Full stop no. If a child is hungry, they get fed. Politics can dictate that adults who are less valuable deserve to starve to death. Politics can dictate that adults who can afford to feed their child but choose not to need to be punished, taxed more, or anything else. But we, as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry. Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive, and anyone choosing to punish adults by starving their children is a monster. Downvote, flag, or come fight me. I'll die on this hill: Neglecting children is bad and anyone who could help and doesn't is at fault.
- graemep 1y ago
  I agree the child should be fed, but we also need to think about the other wide of this. It sounds as though the dad in this case was able to pay but refused to pay. What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    Yeah, it is abuse. But feed the child if the parents won’t or can’t.
  - pertymcpert 1y ago
    You know there are countless parents that abuse their kids, physically, emotionally, sexually. They rape their kids and strangle them until they pass out. They hit them in places where bruises aren't visible. They break bones and threaten the kids with death if they dare tell anyone or show their injury or pain. Why do we suddenly need to especially think about the other side of this because tax money is involved? Now we need to care?
dragonwriter 1y ago
> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. So what? Assuming you have a progressive tax system in the first place, the people that are capable of paying are, in fact, actually paying for the service in any case. Why charge them again? > So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Yes, and one of the reasons for free universal public programs paid for by progressive taxes are often better than means-tested programs is that enforcement isn't free (and neither, in the case of school lunches, is handling money for payment for the people that your means-tested free lunch program now means are required to pay for the service) so you end up spending a whole lot more between payment processing and eligibility verification and enforcement than you save by excluding the people actually paying for the service by higher taxes from receiving the service.
camgunz 1y ago
There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. This idea that we have to threaten people with literal starvation to get them to be productive members of society is ironically deeply impoverished. And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the most productive people in our society are also the richest? Shouldn't it be the opposite? I struggle to see the pillars of this moral structure in any other way than "poor people are a different breed and need stricter rules to keep them in line". Which again is super wrong! TFA cites research that shows that these kids' parents work, but their wages/bills are too low/high. Does anyone want to guess how bad those parents' jobs are? Do we need to detail the struggles working people go through (lack of health care, wildly inconsistent hours, sexual harassment and assault, etc)? The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date. And what is "freeloading" anyway? Kids of all backgrounds and parenting situations get to eat? Bring on the freeloading then. Who do I make the check out to?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  >People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. I don't believe that is true. You didn't provide any support for your claim at all either. Let's just consider a single example: >In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. >... >I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous. >... >As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability. This is from NPR of all places: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County. That's how they got to the point where 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability there. Another example: mtnGoat stated that their father was perfectly capable of paying for lunch but did not do so. If there was a need-based lunch program, mtnGoat would presumably be a "freeloader". Arguably, the real problem in mtnGoat's case is they had an abusive parent. The relevant state tool would be child-protective services, not a cafeteria lunch lady. I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.
madeofpalk 1y ago
The correct answer is to feed children. It's not difficult. You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be. > there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother I'm past pretending this argument is made in good faith. It only comes from hate and selfishness.
sparsely 1y ago
If you don't provide lunches for the children then their parents need to pay for them anyway. Just tax more if you don't already have a budget, this isn't a case where there would be radically different spending patterns without government intervention.
Faaak 1y ago
I'm sorry but I lived in France and this didn't happen. We had to pay for the food (~3€), and if you didn't had the money (basically because of low resources), then it was free. People that could pay payed, and people that couldn't didn't.
viraptor 1y ago
> it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. But it went a step further. He didn't want to pay either way, so the poster was in exactly the same situation as the poor kids. If we're scared to help people who need help, because there's a small chance that someone else may benefit as well, we've lost as a society. Just raise the taxes and give it to every kid.
smeeger 1y ago
his dad did pay… he paid the schools entire budget. you cant just throw the whole system into chaos where people are expected to pay in several different ways and then they turn the tablet around and aggressively ask for a tip. without a clear, simple and singular source of funding it just becomes an excuse for corruption. and here we are, being told that we are inhuman monsters for not subsidizing a bloated tumor of administrators. how about the administrators downsize and take 100k home instead of multiple hundreds of thousands? why arent they subject to any of this scrutiny?
IanCal 1y ago
There are fundamentally two different things going on here. One is whether kids should get fed. The other is how this is paid for. The approach of "the child is charged like anyone else buying a thing and hopefully their parents have given them money" is easy but has obvious problems that we're talking about. However we can split these problems up, one is saying that we will just feed the kids as a flat statement. Then the problem is how to pay for it. You could have state level taxes, but that's not the only option. On the other end of the spectrum you could send a bill to the parents - this is at its core the same as charging the kids in the best case but avoids issues where people don't give the kids the money. You could do that but have programs to only charge the more fortunate. You could do it by taxes on income, you could do it by income but only if you have kids. You could do it with property taxes. All have various benefits and drawbacks, as what's "fair" is arguable. However that is all distinct from whether the kids get fed.
brianmcc 1y ago
Treat it as the common good and societal investment it actually is, and fund it from central taxation like plenty of other countries do. Problem solved!

by mlyle 1y ago

mtnGoat 1y ago

Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. This is not a political issue in my mind, but a basic humanity issue. A child with hunger pangs isn’t focused on learning, if you can’t cover the basic need, the rest is a waste. The haves, selfishly don’t want to help subsidize the have nots. Which I get, BUT these are kids, we as adults should leave them out of it, sack up, and deal with it. You are correct, my dad was a civil engineer, he very much could afford it. I guess he thought high end alcohol and golf were better expenditures. I found it interesting that the article mentions a lot of the debt isn’t from the lowest income brackets.

gopalv 1y ago
> Just roll it into property taxes and call it a day. It's what my district does and the benefits are obvious - there's no "gimme your lunch money" kids who have it hard at home & trying to supplement their diets. The school even hands out a free breakfast, which serves as monitored childcare for the parents who need to drop their kids off before 8 AM, to get to work. The highschool also gives out double servings for kids who come off the morning sports practice sessions. The cynic in me says the biggest beneficiary will be the US Army, who can reliably look for a stream of well fed kids from families which aren't doing well enough to pay for college.

hiddencost 1y ago

This is why we have taxes. Because we can assess how much each person can afford to pay, and then make collective decisions that can't be made by inefficient free market mechanisms.

t0bia_s 1y ago
[flagged]
- iamflimflam1 1y ago
  That’s a big leap from the comment you are replying to.
  - t0bia_s 1y ago
    Please, explain.
    - ta1243 1y ago
      You pay taxes for the military right? And for roads? And for the police? And the courts? And for the schools themselves. Is that socialism?
      - t0bia_s 1y ago
        You took money from people involuntary and relocate. Technically, yes.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  As someone whose family fled from the ex-socialist state of Yugoslavia (well I guess the state itself was socialist, and the ex- part applies to the country itself, but you get what I mean) - who is very much against socialism - this is an absurd connection to make. We're talking about making sure kids have something to eat at the school they go to every day, not giving the workers the means of production. Not everything has to have a profit incentive, and not everything that doesn't make profit can be classed as socialism.

mrweasel 1y ago

> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. I quite frankly don't care about that type of arguments anymore. If someone wants to be a bad person they are free to do so. I don't care, it should not stop the 95%, or more, that want to do the right thing. We continuously make more and more convoluted rules, which are a nightmare for decent people to navigate, but which are just ignored by the assholes. I don't care about fighting the assholes for what is minor amounts, if it means overburdening good people with rules which weren't meant for them anyway. Moving it to taxes essentially does the same thing. The assholes weasel their way out of paying their fair share, while those who want the best for society and everyone is stuck paying the full amount.

mulmen 1y ago

> I don't know what the correct answer is. I do. > The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. It isn't tricky. It's taxes. There's not nuance here. There's only hate and spite for those less fortunate.

nucleardog 1y ago

> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. In your case, it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. I say this as an IT worker making what most would consider an absurd amount of money and pays 0.55*absurd money in taxes, a dad, a human, etc... what the fuck does any of this matter. If a child is hungry, the only concern is feeding that child. A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves. If their parents fail to care for them, we have various mechanisms for the state to step in in their stead up to and including taking them away and giving them to someone else. "Sorry, Johnny, your dad has the money to pay for lunch but chose not to so we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up." Full stop no. If a child is hungry, they get fed. Politics can dictate that adults who are less valuable deserve to starve to death. Politics can dictate that adults who can afford to feed their child but choose not to need to be punished, taxed more, or anything else. But we, as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry. Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive, and anyone choosing to punish adults by starving their children is a monster. Downvote, flag, or come fight me. I'll die on this hill: Neglecting children is bad and anyone who could help and doesn't is at fault.

graemep 1y ago
I agree the child should be fed, but we also need to think about the other wide of this. It sounds as though the dad in this case was able to pay but refused to pay. What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  Yeah, it is abuse. But feed the child if the parents won’t or can’t.
- pertymcpert 1y ago
  You know there are countless parents that abuse their kids, physically, emotionally, sexually. They rape their kids and strangle them until they pass out. They hit them in places where bruises aren't visible. They break bones and threaten the kids with death if they dare tell anyone or show their injury or pain. Why do we suddenly need to especially think about the other side of this because tax money is involved? Now we need to care?

dragonwriter 1y ago

> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother. So what? Assuming you have a progressive tax system in the first place, the people that are capable of paying are, in fact, actually paying for the service in any case. Why charge them again? > So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism. Yes, and one of the reasons for free universal public programs paid for by progressive taxes are often better than means-tested programs is that enforcement isn't free (and neither, in the case of school lunches, is handling money for payment for the people that your means-tested free lunch program now means are required to pay for the service) so you end up spending a whole lot more between payment processing and eligibility verification and enforcement than you save by excluding the people actually paying for the service by higher taxes from receiving the service.

camgunz 1y ago

There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs. People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. This idea that we have to threaten people with literal starvation to get them to be productive members of society is ironically deeply impoverished. And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the most productive people in our society are also the richest? Shouldn't it be the opposite? I struggle to see the pillars of this moral structure in any other way than "poor people are a different breed and need stricter rules to keep them in line". Which again is super wrong! TFA cites research that shows that these kids' parents work, but their wages/bills are too low/high. Does anyone want to guess how bad those parents' jobs are? Do we need to detail the struggles working people go through (lack of health care, wildly inconsistent hours, sexual harassment and assault, etc)? The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date. And what is "freeloading" anyway? Kids of all backgrounds and parenting situations get to eat? Bring on the freeloading then. Who do I make the check out to?

0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
>People really think there are, but every time we look we find practically no freeloaders. I don't believe that is true. You didn't provide any support for your claim at all either. Let's just consider a single example: >In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government. >... >I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous. >... >As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability. This is from NPR of all places: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ Why are these health problems growing so fast? The obvious explanation is that the stigma against faking disability is evaporating in places like Hale County. That's how they got to the point where 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability there. Another example: mtnGoat stated that their father was perfectly capable of paying for lunch but did not do so. If there was a need-based lunch program, mtnGoat would presumably be a "freeloader". Arguably, the real problem in mtnGoat's case is they had an abusive parent. The relevant state tool would be child-protective services, not a cafeteria lunch lady. I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

madeofpalk 1y ago

The correct answer is to feed children. It's not difficult. You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be. > there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother I'm past pretending this argument is made in good faith. It only comes from hate and selfishness.

sparsely 1y ago

If you don't provide lunches for the children then their parents need to pay for them anyway. Just tax more if you don't already have a budget, this isn't a case where there would be radically different spending patterns without government intervention.

Faaak 1y ago

I'm sorry but I lived in France and this didn't happen. We had to pay for the food (~3€), and if you didn't had the money (basically because of low resources), then it was free. People that could pay payed, and people that couldn't didn't.

viraptor 1y ago

> it sounds like your dad was maybe capable of paying but wanted to freeload. But it went a step further. He didn't want to pay either way, so the poster was in exactly the same situation as the poor kids. If we're scared to help people who need help, because there's a small chance that someone else may benefit as well, we've lost as a society. Just raise the taxes and give it to every kid.

smeeger 1y ago

his dad did pay… he paid the schools entire budget. you cant just throw the whole system into chaos where people are expected to pay in several different ways and then they turn the tablet around and aggressively ask for a tip. without a clear, simple and singular source of funding it just becomes an excuse for corruption. and here we are, being told that we are inhuman monsters for not subsidizing a bloated tumor of administrators. how about the administrators downsize and take 100k home instead of multiple hundreds of thousands? why arent they subject to any of this scrutiny?

IanCal 1y ago

There are fundamentally two different things going on here. One is whether kids should get fed. The other is how this is paid for. The approach of "the child is charged like anyone else buying a thing and hopefully their parents have given them money" is easy but has obvious problems that we're talking about. However we can split these problems up, one is saying that we will just feed the kids as a flat statement. Then the problem is how to pay for it. You could have state level taxes, but that's not the only option. On the other end of the spectrum you could send a bill to the parents - this is at its core the same as charging the kids in the best case but avoids issues where people don't give the kids the money. You could do that but have programs to only charge the more fortunate. You could do it by taxes on income, you could do it by income but only if you have kids. You could do it with property taxes. All have various benefits and drawbacks, as what's "fair" is arguable. However that is all distinct from whether the kids get fed.

brianmcc 1y ago

Treat it as the common good and societal investment it actually is, and fund it from central taxation like plenty of other countries do. Problem solved!