[mlyle]

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.

[camgunz]

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 The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date.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]

>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/

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.

[framapotari]

> 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.

If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a fact. You may not _want_ children to go hungry but if you advocate for that system then you are absolutely okay with a number of children going hungry.

[oefrha]

When I was in school we paid for (very fairly priced) school meals while the poor students were subsidized. It was handled pretty discreetly as well, I don’t think any kid was shamed for it, plus kids have a million ways to find out who’s poor anyway if they’re into bullying. So pretending the solution is binary is ridiculous.

Hell, my college education from Stanford, including room and board and a very modest allowance, was entirely covered by a university fund, no strings attached, while the rich kids paid in full. If $65k a year can be selectively waived (from a very rich institution, yes I’m aware, but I’m talking about the model), no way you can’t do that for a small portion of school lunches.

[BoingBoomTschak]

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so?

Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

[vidarh]

Pray tell what horrible consequences you expect from feeding children to ensure they don't go hungry.

[dredmorbius]

Crickets!!!

[framapotari]

I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.

[jdbernard]

This is the thing to me. I'm sympathetic to the concern of people taking advantage of others, but if the government is forcing children to be there (which we are), and already having to bear the cost of funding these schools generally, we really should include the cost of basic nutrition for all students as an operating cost, just like the electric bill and teacher's salaries.

[BoingBoomTschak]

1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing.

2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).

[thrance]

Yeah, I'm a socialist: I believe children shouldn't be hungry in the richest country the Earth has ever seen. Sue me. Your slippery slope fallacy is no excuse for you willingness to let children starve.

Your country is falling into fasicsm and there are still people like you going "feeding kids is literally communism". No wonder this country is going down, its citizens are incapable of the most basic compassion toward one another.

[GuinansEyebrows]

i don't think you understand what socialism is. government assistance programs are not socialism.

[dredmorbius]

As much as I'm in favour of such programmes, they are in fact social welfare and part of the social welfare state.

It's not absolute public ownership of all means of production. But within the continuum between reactionary caveat emptor lessez faire private absolutism and fully automated luxury gay space communism, it's a nudge or two toward the latter.

And an unarguable good, I hasten to add.

[taurath]

If you’ve ever considered going on disability, or needed to, you’d be very quickly enlightened. It’s hard. You have to have documentation, you will get denied. Even then the benefits are pretty shit. It’s not a thing that you can just accidently get. There’s a lot of people who are just disabled.

What happens if the parents who should be responsible, aren’t?

[lukan]

"What happens if the parents who should be responsible, aren’t?"

Normally, child protection service?

(But what I know, they don't always improve things)

[vidarh]

Which do you think is cheaper: Involving social services because someone isn't paying for school lunch, which would involve the state either paying foster parents or providing other costly monitoring, possible court cases, and/or support, or simply covering the cost of school lunches?

[lukan]

Simply covering school lunches, if this would be the decusion here.

But that wouldn't solve the problem of negligent parents, only ease things a little bit for children.

[switch007]

For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare, who could have worked, because they learnt the game. The two sides have to move beyond these talking points if any useful discussion is to be had.

[camgunz]

> For every story about it being difficult to claim, there are plenty about people who haven't worked for 20 years who have received over £400,000 in welfare

This is perfectly accurate: the stories you hear make these issues out to be equal, when in fact they're anything but. Study after study shows that work requirements (the policy you're implicitly advocating for here) do not work:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expandi...

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/work-requirements-dont-work

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/more-evidence-that-work-requiremen...

https://www.cbpp.org/research/tanf-studies-show-work-require...

https://www.epi.org/publication/snap-medicaid-work-requireme...

More to the point, millions of people are eligible for TANF benefits but don't receive them. Which is to say, even if there are some people scamming the system, there's tons of people who could legitimately receive benefits but don't.

---

The overall point here is that if we let criminals and a very small number of freeloaders sour us on these programs, we literally let kids go hungry; we literally let them die of preventable illnesses; etc. etc. It is absolutely bonkers to me that we are making this tradeoff.

[switch007]

FWIW I do more than "hear" about these "stories". My figures weren't just made up. Personal experience but I'm not saying more than that

[b2w]

The kid is starving and child protective services isn't a free lunch program. Is the effort of potentially displacing the kid to foster care really solving the immediate problem?

[vidarh]

Foster parents are also paid most places. Even purely in financial terms, for each child in foster care over something like this you could feed a lot of children instead, and avoiding the harmful effects of unnecessary interventions.

[dredmorbius]

The benefit we're talking about here is food. Served in school lunchrooms. To students who are enrolled at that school. How exactly do you see this being abused?

People can only eat so much at a single sitting. Even highly-active, sports-team-member, teenaged boys. (I used to be one.) There are no massive opportunities for skimming or graft in the lunch line itself.

What could go wrong?

A child who's not otherwise likely to be in school decides to attend because they get fed. Win!

A child whose family are capable of affording a full-cost lunch free-ride. So what, that's a small fraction of total meals, make it up in taxes! (As I've discussed previously in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43895455>.)

Complaints about free meals are like complaining about penny-ante voter fraud. The big opportunities aren't in showing up to polling places, as that's simply too expensive (in direct, physical-space costs). Voter fraud as a viable tactic occurs through unwarranted voter-roll purges, by disinformation about voting times and places, very rarely through corruption of counting processes (voting machines, election judges, and the like). But not by having people showing up to vote multiple times.

Sure, there's opportunity for fraud in school lunch programmes, but it's not transacted through stomachs. It's lunchroom staff skimming the till, it's vendor fraud, it's political corruption, it's kickbacks and sweetheart deals.

All of which are in fact real fraud.

But they are not identified or mitigated through means testing. Rather you want forensic audits, oversight, management practices, and law-enforcement investigating and prosecuting actual political corruption.

The kids eat either way.

[camgunz]

> 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.

You can just look at what Social Security says about this [0]. TL;DR:

- Baby boomers getting old

- Economic conditions (you can see this in the data [1], where there's a suspicious huge leap in claims right around Trump monkeying around w/ the economy)

- Absent/inadequate health care

More directly, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with culture. The average disability application age is ~50 [2]. If this were a cultural issue you'd see that number declining.

> Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state.

What policy are you advocating here? So far all you've talked about is the non-existent freeloader problem.

[0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/briefing-papers/bp2019-01.ht...

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html

[2]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2023/sect03...

[gred]

> There are no moral hazards when it comes to social welfare programs.

This is a wild statement. Of course people take advantage of welfare programs. Of course welfare programs have unintended consequences and sometimes encourage immoral or anti-social behavior. That doesn't mean they're all bad or that they need to be completely eliminated, but leading with this obvious falsehood made it very hard to read the rest of your comment.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/covid-19-fraud-enfor...

[camgunz]

This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things:

- The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the program. There were 640,000 SNAP fraud investigations in 2014 [0]. If they cost $1,000 each that's $640m, and I bet they cost more!

- The vast majority of fraud is either criminal, retailer, or both [1]

The "moral hazard" angle of these programs is wildly overplayed. You don't hear anything about:

- criminal trafficking

- retailer fraud

- program benefits

There's political reasons for this, but it doesn't matter. Our brainrot on social programs is intense.

> https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/covid-19-fraud-enfor...

Looking at the fact sheet linked from that release [2], that stat that jumps out to me is 3,500 individuals charged totaling $1.4b in stolen CARES Act funds (this isn't a direct stat, but the numbers only get worse if we presume even more money from this and other programs was stolen), which is $400k/individual charged. It doesn't really seem possible for a person or household to have bilked the government for $400k under the individual benefits of the CARES Act [3]. We're looking at white collar fraud here, again a thing you never hear anything about.

Finally, we should view some levels of fraud as indicative of broader social ills. For example the number of blue collar jobs has greatly diminished just in a single lifetime [4]. Could that be responsible for the dramatic increase in Social Security Disability claims (yes)?

[0]: https://www.cbpp.org/snap-combating-fraud-and-improving-prog...

[1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R45147.html

[2]: https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus/media/1347156/dl?inline

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act#Relief_to_individual...

[4]: https://cepr.net/publications/the-decline-of-blue-collar-job...

[hgomersall]

As the lauded private sector are well aware, the optimal amount of fraud is non zero:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

[ggandv]

I wonder if optimizing for votes, as is the day to day business of most policy makers, gets you to the same place as optimizing for profits like in the private sector? If not, studying that could be one way to improve the public sector output. Not that shareholders vote, on average, but you get the idea.

[mech9879876]

You swept the issue of fraudulent social security disability claims under the rug. It seems apparent to me that your attitude toward individual level accountability is one that denies agency of the individual and ascribes their moral failures as a result of societal-level problems. After all, there is no moral hazard when individuals have no moral agency to begin with.

[camgunz]

I posted about it in a different little branch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903848

TL;DR: the average disability recipient age has hovered ~50 (stddev 1.54 years) since 1960. The theory of "baby boomers are a huge generation, they got old and US health care sucks ass" is far more parsimonious than your theory of individual accountability, which has to explain why every generation suddenly becomes fraudulent/immoral/unaccountable at the exact same point in their lives.

[mech9879876]

Aggregating statistics regarding age has very little explanatory value in regards to fraud and is a non sequitir. I would not be surprised if the average age of a convicted insurance fraudster has remained relatively constant over time either.

The example in linked materials of 1 in 4 adults in Hale County receiving disability payments is a clear example of a situation where individuals and healthcare providers have both contributed to widescale fraud. This is an obvious case where moral hazard is present and you continue to deny it.

[mtnGoat]

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]

> 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.

[IanCal]

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.

[madeofpalk]

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.

[nucleardog]

> 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.

[em-bee]

exactly. if you want to play hardball, then send a bill to the parents. send a debt collector if you believe that they have the money. but don't withhold food from the children. i mean we might as well bar children from school if their parents don't pay taxes. it's really the same thing.

[graemep]

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.

[pertymcpert]

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?

[graemep]

No, we should care in all cases.

The point is that the problem is not necessarily fixed by providing lunch. What else is going on if someone is deliberately not feeding a child?

[mulmen]

Why would providing food preclude support for victims of or intervention in other types of abuse?

[nkrisc]

Yeah, it is abuse. But feed the child if the parents won’t or can’t.

[framapotari]

All the more reason for using schools to feed children who may be abused and starved at home.

[graemep]

Yes, but is that all you do? One meal a day does not solve the problems of an abused child.

[acdha]

You know, we say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” a lot for technical problems but it’s far more critical here. A child from a failing home has a lot of problems and it often takes a long time to solve them, but we can for a trivial amount of money ensure that child isn’t malnourished because they get breakfast, lunch, and in many Title 1 schools, dinner. Many of the other problems of poverty, neglect, or abuse are much harder to solve – e.g. sending a child to foster care might be the solution for abuse but it’s slow and has plenty of risks of its own – but this one is easy and cheap to fix while we work on the hard problems.

[framapotari]

Of course that is not all, how on earth did you get that impression?

Doing something to address a problem doesn't imply that nothing else will be done and that this one thing is expected to solve the problem entirely. I didn't think this needed explaining.

[ninalanyon]

That really is someone else's problem. The best the school can do is feed and support the child and report the abuse to the relevant authorities.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> What sort of person puts their own child through this to make a point? It is neglectful or abusive.

So... your point is that not feeding the child is neglectful or abusive?

That's basically the position that proponents of free school meals have.

[ninalanyon]

> anyone choosing to punish adults by starving their children is a monster.

Well said!

[charcircuit]

>A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves.

This is disrespectful to the intelligence of children.

>we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up

Not giving people free things is not a punishment.

>as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry.

Giving away free food is not the only way to achieve that.

>Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive

I disagree as there may be times where it is fine. This statement to me is equivalent to saying that we shouldn't make children feel sadness or pain. These are just parts of living. People will naturally experience them and later move on.

>punish adults by starving their children

Schools do not starve children. While yes schools prohihit people from leaving, school only last for a part of the day before they are released, and parents can pickup a child at any time. In order to starve someone you need to block access to food for a very long period of time.

[decimalenough]

I'm not sure where to even begin with this, but a large part of why free school lunches exist is that there are many kids in abusive or simply desperately poor families who do not get fed properly, meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get.

> Not giving people free things is not a punishment.

This is absurd. Kids don't have money to purchase what they need, so parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them. Intentionally not providing children what they need, like food, is abuse, period.

[charcircuit]

>meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get

"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

>Kids don't have money to purchase what they need

Again you are underestimating the abilities of kids. They are capable of providing value to others and consequently receiving money or goods that they need.

>parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.

But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family. I wouldn't expect a patent to take in every homeless person to their household because they don't have money to purchase what they need.

>Intentionally not providing children what they need, like food, is abuse, period.

I think it's more complex. Parents have power over children and using that power they can restrict what they do and make it impossible for them to acquire what they need. To me this restriction is what is abusive and it would apply to anyone else. If you locked anyone in a room and denied them water, that would be abuse.

[mulmen]

> Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

It’s a lot easier to teach someone when they aren’t starving.

Teaching someone to fish almost certainly requires giving them a fish.

That’s how teaching works. First you do it for them, then you ask them to try and you help them when they falter.

[wredcoll]

> By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

You realize this is a completely invented statement of faith, right? It has no data or research supporting it.

[jdbernard]

> >parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.

> But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family.

I'd like to live in a society where we extend this duty to the society. It is the parent's duty foremost, but we as a society should see this as our duty as well, at the very least for our children (and let's think of it that way, we are in this together, at least when it comes to our children).

> A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

I'm with you as far as the principle of personal responsibility is concerned, we are all better when everyone contributes, and I agree that we should teach our children this principle. However, the whole reason that, even legally, we don't treat kids as adults is that they are not adults, cannot and should not be held to the same standards. Withholding the basic necessities of life is not the way to teach this principle.

It doesn't even work consistently. I'd argue that many of the people that are fraudulently taking advantage of welfare programs are doing so because they were taught, as kids, that society doesn't care about them. So why should they care about us? Why shouldn't they take advantage of whatever they can? I'm not justifying this position, or even saying it is logically sound, but kids are not adults. If withholding school lunches is your method for "teaching responsibility" it is really ineffective.

Just feed the kids. We're not giving them free Xboxes. We're keeping them healthy and alive so that they can learn.

[sparsely]

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.

[hiddencost]

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.

[mrweasel]

> 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.

[brianmcc]

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!

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[smeeger]

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?

[viraptor]

> 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.

[Faaak]

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.

[mulmen]

> 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.