This is in addition to the current
Posted on 09/05/2013 6:56:01 AM PDT by kevcol
Boston public schools will begin serving free lunches to all students this school year even if families have the financial means to pay, school officials are expected to announce Tuesday.
The meal program, more than a year in the making, is part of an experimental federal initiative that aims to make it easier for students from low-income families to receive free meals by eliminating the need to fill out paperwork, including potentially invasive questions about income.
Cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago have been or will be participating in the free-meal program. Starting next school year, the program will be open to any school district across the country with high concentrations of students from low-income families. The cost of the free meals will be covered by the federal government.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
Its probably cheaper to just give them all free lunch than it is to keep track of the paperwork to charge them
The cost of the free meals will be covered by the federal government.
Because it might embarrass people if they have to actually fill out paperwork to get free stuff FROM THE HARD-WORKING TAXPAYERS
Translation:
“Drag everyone down to the bottom because it’s insensitive to do anything that makes moochers feel like they are moochers.”
Another back-door strategy to entice everyone to suck the public teat.
If it’s the same lunches the kids have been rejecting, it’s going in the garbage one way or the other...
Then they will make a big deal about some students “who can afford to pay for the lunches” being cheaters to take the free ones. And send backpacks full of food home with the poor kids on the weekends, because they won’t know where their next meal will come from, at home.
This is a great idea, how about we eliminate paperwork/invasive income questions for taxpayers while we are at it.
I knew there was a catch: the free meals are not free.
I am SOOOO tired of paying for this crap.
When do we say “no more!”?
This has been going on in my district, the LAUSD, in Los Angeles for years. The district got rid of the old meal tickets at the inner-city schools and just fed everyone that showed up — this now includes breakfast and lunch in the summers when schools are closed, no questions asked.
The kids are all getting free lunches (and maybe breakfasts).
But the meals won’t nourish them, because they’re designed by Michelle Hussein obama!!!!
They did this in my elementary school in California in the early 70s. Probably wasn’t a Federal program then, though.
I think it’s possible that total cost would be less this way ... however, the employees who would have been doing the paperwork are still employed: they just have less to do. Maybe there’s some savings in the physical cost of paper, printing, file folders, etc., though.
The government teat, fully funded by us taxpayers, becomes sweeter and bigger.
This madness has GOT to stop!
I can imagine a much better version of this at the state level.
To explain, agribusiness in the US is gigantic, and has been in over-surplus since the turn of the 20th Century, even at the height of the Dust Bowl. And paradoxically, while farmers can be hurt by a bad crop, they can be wiped out by a very good crop.
While the national government spends an enormous amount of money to stabilize farm prices, there has been a slow effort to move back to market forces. But in effect, this means that farmers face greater risks. In either case, an awful lot of food is wasted, or put into expensive storage warehouses for months, and wasted.
So states could aid both their own farmers and schoolchildren, if they were to buy up surplus crops and use them both for school lunches, but mostly as a “bonus” to the poor on food stamps.
Say for example, it has been a very good year for potatoes. The potato farmers in a state have maxed out how many they can sell fresh and for processing, so they have a surplus. The state offers to buy the surplus at a fixed price, “at cost”, so while the farmers don’t really make money on the surplus, they don’t lose money, either.
Then, when a family on food stamps comes in to buy food, the state gives them say 10 pounds of spare potatoes, that don’t count against their food stamps.
Importantly, such produce giveaways will not have much effect on the fresh produce market, as people who buy their own food tend to prefer processed food, only eating a fixed amount of fresh produce.
In my town one person spends a couple of man-months doing qualifications for the whole school district. Kids from families on TANF/SNAP go on free/reduced lunches automatically with next to no time spent on her part. The staff member really isn’t costing much compared to the revenue the district takes in from the paying families.
The cost/benefit would depend on the specific district’s lost revenues vs. actual cost savings.
Communism this is, plain and simple.
That would work if the food-stamp purchasers shop only at special state food-stamp stores. The whole point of food vouchers is that the users make their own decisions about where to shop and what to buy.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Not all retailers participate in food stamps. But for those that do, they could get a rough approximation of potatoes based on how many food stamps they regularly process.
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