I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

Kids don't go to all schools: they go to their school.

So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.

In our case, sold to the bidder who gave kickbacks to the district supervisor.

It wasn't just sold to the lowest bidder, the subsidized lunch program is specifically not to subsidize the kids, but to bail out farmers growing crap nobody wants.

People generally don't want the Federal government involved, thats where the consensus has been lacking.

this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing

You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if its deemed important, keep the federal government out of it

I've heard of some schools going out of their way to make it obvious which kids were receiving free lunch and which weren't; however, that wasn't universal to all programs.

Our school just had "lunch tickets." There was a register on a different floor from the lunch room where you could go buy them, pick them up if your parents bought them by check, or pick them up if you were on the assistance list. Once you had them they were all the same. Only the person at the register would know your status.

None of my friends who got that ever were embarrassed in any way about using them as they were the only ones to know.

> Sounds like child services should take those children then?

This is a HUGE, dangerous leap.

> If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.

Plenty of parents (and plenty of people generally) just aren't aware of social services but are quite aware that they're supposed to feed and care for their children. Plenty more forget to fill out paperwork and return phone calls. Many states' governments actively make applying for welfare and support difficult or inconvenient - plenty of parents can't take the time to return paperwork in person, make phone calls during the workday, etc. Needing support - either welfare or just kindness and assistance - is not a moral failure and not a sign of a bad parent.

Beyond that, CPS wouldn't necessarily provide a great life for the child. There is a lot of difference between an imperfect parent and a danger to a child. Oh, and of course, CPS is a lot more expensive to run than a few meals. Giving out free meals at school is a lot easier if we want kids to be fed.

As an anecdote, I was laid off from my job once, and someone asked me if I applied for unemployment within my state. I didn't know it existed, nor that I was eligible until months later when a barista told me during small talk. The whole time I managed to remember to feed myself (and my family). I sure hope no internet commenter would look at that and decide to take my children away!

Lose your job, lose your children. Great policy ideas from the thoughtful HN crowd, as always.

Yes, and while waiting for the child services to intervene then those children would still be starving.

One of the "don't say the quiet part out loud" with transit fares (which would NOT apply to school lunches) is that transit fares are a convenient way to remove unwanted transit enjoyers.

It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".

Did you mean no? The question was about whether the bureaucracy was worth it and you said yes, then show an example where bureaucracy is not justified.

Schools seem amazing at spending on lunches, when they can feed people for less than $5 a meal. I can’t eat for that amount, even when cooking at home these days. I’m not seeing clearly what your transit agency’s payment system upgrade has to do with school lunches or why that somehow supports the idea that they’re not spending prudently.

Pardon my nitpick, but the “fair” -> “fare” typo is in this context more confusing than the average typo, so I thought I’d let you know :-)

Maybe I am too sick right now to understand your comment, but isn't this an argument for actually making public transit free or sth? If merely upgrading the system costs 10 times the revenue? Isn't it what is actually argued about for school lunches?

I suspect the only real benefit is a change in behavior of some passengers. They _paid_ for a thing and therefore feel more respectful towards it.

Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).

None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.

> but our governments are awful at spending our money.

No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.

Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.

In the current moment, I agree that "the state" can't save money by making it free for everyone. However, it is a lot harder to quantify how much other savings are realized by having healthier kids and reduced healthcare costs. Plus we know kids do better in school when fed well and that long term taxable income, better colleges, business job generation, etc. could eventually pay for itself. Obviously this is a much more complicated thing to calculate and quantify.

So maybe $5M on a NY state education budget of nearly $40B, or less than two hundredths of one percent. Isn’t it weird that we pay for everything else but keep the food in a separate accounting budget?

> it would cost more to make it free for everyone

That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)

To make it worse, I believe that there have been incidences where people have tried to do similar (pay off school lunch debt) and the School District has refused, citing reasons from "processing overhead" to "privacy".

The issue is that the positive externality is really hard to measure, and penny-pinching policies only care about what is easily measured, it's just another instance of the McNamara fallacy.

As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.

There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.

Indeed universal free lunch programs are on the chopping block. To my understanding the cuts are still at the proposal stage though.

[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...

Who’s cruelty, and what’s the motivation?

I don't have kids, and will never have kids, but even so I don't see people whose children are being denied food as a problem that the children's parent's caused. I see hungry kids who can't learn because they're distracted by hunger as the problem, and I will gladly pay taxes to see that they don't go hungry.

One of the best ways to reduce crime and drug addiction is education. Hungry kids don't learn well. Feeding kids so they can concentrate on learning prevents problems not creates them.

Without kids living and being born and learning and becoming productive members of society your lifestyle would not exist and current economic models would collapse in a handful of years.

You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.

Honest question: are you a Malthusian? If so, what do you think is the ideal birth rate?

It’s hard to tell from your comment whether you mean the lunch debt is the problem, or the kids are the problem.

> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.

Hate to turn into Helen Lovejoy here, but won't you please think of the children? The victims of the problem are the children. You're trying to punish the parents, and the kids get caught in the crossfire.