[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).

[rwmj]

And presumably you want them shaped in the best possible way, which is hardly possible if children are hungry or undernourished.

[framapotari]

1) If they don't have time or competency then surely they can pay for the services of someone who can. Most people don't have the time or competency to grow their own food but we still expect them to purchase their food from someone who can.

2) The state taking money from people by force in order to mandate the shaping of malleable young minds sounds like exactly the kind of grave consequences of socialism you fear.

[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.

[vidarh]

But "negligent" isn't a binary, and it's not just parents who don't want to, but parents who can't afford to. For a lot of children, easing things a little bit might be all that is needed. For others it might ease things enough that it can be part of a set of relatively light interventions.

For those who genuinely need more heavy handed interventions, it's not a solution, but it's also not in any way detrimental.

[lukan]

Yeah, but in this concrete case we are talking about someone whose parents could have afford it, but didn't to teach the state a lesson or something, but all they(or he) did was made life hell for their son. That is a serious parent fault and someone acting like this here, would likely also act weird with other things.

But like I stated, I am not a fan of child protection service, they can make things worse.

And if school is free, so should be lunch for the students. Apparently people assumed I opposed that here?

[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

[GuinansEyebrows]

so, you anecdotally know enough people who are somehow receiving benefits you don't think they deserve to tip the scale by a statistically relevant amount?

[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...