Free Republic

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — At Florin High School, every student gets a free lunch, even if they can afford to pay for it, and CBS13 has discovered that a lot of that free food ends up in the trash. Throwing away food is just the beginning of a drain on your taxpayer dollars. Last year, 14 percent of students paid for their own meals because they didn’t qualify for free lunch. “The federal government [now] allows, if 80 percent or more of the school is eligible for free lunch, the paid students, we would feed them for free,” said Michelle Drake...

“There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”—the title of a book published by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman—may be economic fact, but that did not deter the U.S. Justice Department from informing furloughed department workers that they can have one. In an “Ethics Q&A” the DOJ published on its website advising furloughed employees on what they can and cannot ethically do during a government shutdown, the department said it was okay for them to accept free sandwiches from commercial enterprises as long as those sandwiches were offered free to all federal workers and not just some. …

It is an old saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but a record 18.7 million American schoolchildren would not have learned that lesson when they attended school in fiscal year 2012. That is because U.S. taxpayers—via the U.S. Department of Agriculture—were picking up the tab for their lunch. According to new data from the USDA, during the average school month in fiscal year 2012, 18.7 million students in U.S. high schools and grammar schools were given completely free lunches, courtesy of the department’s National School Lunch Program. That was up from the record of 18.4...