[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?