Nate Armbruster
At the beginning of this school year, COVID-era free meals for all have expired. An estimated 10 million children now no longer have access to free lunch, according to the Agriculture Department, because their parents are above, or in many cases just barely over, the poverty line.
While many people think the free lunch program is a good thing for our kids in school, many people disagree. Some of those folks who disagree are explaining why they feel that way in an AskReddit thread. Here’s what people are saying.
People who are against kids having free school lunches, why?
– u/Arktikos02
1.
My BIL is against free lunches. Like, for any kid, for any reason because the parents should provide it. Oh, they can’t afford it? “Their kids being hungry would motivate them to get a better job, improve their lives.” …As if people aren’t trying to do that long before they have hungry kids.
The dude couldn’t grasp that having trouble feeding your kids – daily – means that you feel desperate every day, that you need immediate relief, not just eventual, and that’s how crime increases. He just… didn’t believe that’s a thing, like not everyone has a better opportunity just hanging around within reach. Lost a lot of respect for him that day.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for lifetime… But it takes a while to learn how to do that reliably, so you need to feed him in the meantime, and he’ll need to borrow some line and hooks at a minimum.
— Best_failure
2.
I’m only against it being shitty food. Give them some proper god damn nutrition and not all this processed sugary shit.
– Visual-Ad-6562
3.
It’s a slippery slope.
If we give them free lunches, what’s next? Paying for the medicine they need to survive? Yeah. I don’t think so. Making sure they have somewhere safe to live? Sorry. Not while I’m of voting age. Besides, if we give food to hungry kids, how will they ever learn to appreciate a meal they’ve bought themselves? They’ll come to expect that their government should be able to help meet their basic needs, and that’s a bridge too far.
Ultimately, I prefer not to think about uncomfortable things like kids in my own country who don’t have enough to eat, so I’d rather pretend they don’t exist. Giving them lunch would essentially recognize their suffering which would bum my whole vibe. Besides, if those kids are able to take their minds off of their empty stomachs, they’ll be more able to compete with my kid for things, and we can’t have that.
Edit: this was sarcastic, but it’s kind of wild how closely this mirrors legitimate talking points from those on the right.
– WatchTheBoom
4.
I’m not against kids being fed on the regular. I’m against the constant slide of needing government to step in and handle business that should be handled by their parents.
Their are programs for those in need. We shouldn’t need it for everybody.
Parental apathy in this country is one of the biggest roots of our problems in my opinion. It’s easier to let Uncle Sam take care of us than to make the hard choices and live our own lives.
For the record I also understand the wealth distribution is an issue. But sucking more on the government teat because mean capitalists are hogging all the dough is not going to solve it. It’s going to drive us further down an unpleasant path. Use our legislative system to correct the path and vote out the special interests. No it’s not easy or quick, but neither was our journey down.
– kurt_go_bang
5.
Most of the people against increase of these programs (because this already exists and gets tons of funding in every district) are usually not against the idea, they’re against the bad track record of how tax money is generally spent. For example; in my area they increased the school system budget immensely a couple years ago for all these supposed improvements to education and resources for students. In that time not a single improvement or program at the schools have benefitted, but the Superintendent got a shiny new building for his staff and a couple extra salaried assistants (who just happened to be family members and friends, funny that huh?)
It’s the same with healthcare; you won’t find many even Republicans now that would disagree there needs to be healthcare reform, the argument is really who and how. Because generally the resistance to that is we don’t need to throw tax money at the government and get little to nothing from it.
– ironwolf56
6.
It’s to punish parents who could get off their ass and get a job or stop spending their money on drugs and instead take responsibility for the children they created. Why should Joe’s kids get a free lunch when Joe is a deadbeat, meanwhile I work my ass off to live paycheck to paycheck so my kids are fed.
Again, not my opinion. But a lot of people opposed to feee school lunches feel this way – they’re pissed that lazy, irresponsible parents get assistance while they bust their ass just to have nothing. They feel like it’s unfair to ‘reward’ or ‘enable’ people who are willfully lazy.
I am a huge proponent of the free and reduced lunch program. I’m 26 and it was around when I was a kid – literally like 90% of my school probably qualified. The income limit for reduced lunch is very reasonable in my opinion – in a household of 4, you can get reduced lunch with an annual income up to $51,000. So if you’re busting your ass to make $55k a year, yeah, I could see why you’d be pissed that Joe’s kids eat for free while you just barely miss the cutoff for assistance.
There is so much surplus in agriculture here, that there’s no reason for any kid to go hungry. I think free lunch for every single child would be extreme considering plenty of parents make a lot of money, and I think resources should be directed towards the kids who need assistance the most. I grew up poor and neglected, and no kid deserves to suffer just because their parents are poor, or if they don’t have money because the parents are drug addicts/lazy/irresponsible/whatever.
– hawkeyepitts
7.
The reason is that wealthy people do not send children to public schools, so often will vote down any attempt to increase funding to the local public school system because they are not using it.
As with many of the problems in the US, results and votes would be different if the wealthy had the same investment in the system. Some Scandinavian countries outlaw private schools, which is a great idea. It requires wealthy and privileged people to be involved in the same system rather than buy into a new one. Politicians would have the incentive to provide good schools and fund them properly as that is where there children go to school. It is the same with the military, the US would be at war far less if there was a required draft in which wealthy children were subject to server. Under the current system a strong voting block can systematically defund the public school. This happened in New York. A religious group, who sent their children to private, mostly religious education schools, defunded the local public school by controlling the school board even though none of their children attended the school. Unfortunately, this would never happen, as religions are allowed to run private school, who then can spend little to no time teaching academics.
– tkfx2000
8.
I totally disagree with this person, but a coworker who is also a teacher is against it. She said, “These people can afford it. I don’t think I should have to pay for their kids’ lunches.” We teach in an affluent school. I pointed out that we don’t know people’s finances. I have paid for lunches out of pocket so students didn’t go hungry or fed children because there was a lot going at home and no one fed them. Hungry children can’t learn. She felt that these were the exception. My thought is if we feed them all, the exceptions are alway taken care of as well.
– triteandtrifle
9.
They don’t want POC getting anything and are willing to let impoverished white children starve to do it.
– jeshaffer2
10.
Let’s get this title wording corrected first, because NOTHING is free.
New title
People who are against taxpayer funded child lunches,why?
– splashybear
11.
“Are they outside of a vagina? Yeah? Then they can go fuck themselves until they’re old enough to be infantry.” – The Republican Party
– DarthDregan
12.
I personally am not against giving students free lunches. However, I don’t trust the government to implement any program like this properly. We already know how bad school lunches are already in general.
I’m worried any funding will go to companies that will provide low-quality food, while school administrators receive kickbacks.
– Nomoxis117
13.
Hi there, I’m your average California night custodian and I clean up at my local elementary school. I have an argument against free school lunches that you may have not considered. If everyone got free meals then there would be nothing for me to throw away at the end of the day. There are usually a lot of leftovers that haven’t even been passed to the kids that couldn’t pay and I can fill an entire trash can. Many times this bin is clean and I can eat out of it (everything is wrapped in plastic, relax). If the lunch is free and every kid got a meal then there wouldn’t be any left over for poor little old me. Won’t you stop and think about the night custodians that eat out of the trash? /S
– OMGezus
14.
I’m a massive supporter of the Free and Reduced School Lunch Program which already exists.
It’s a good way to subsidize food budgets for low income people.
I don’t support subsidizing food for rich families. What problem does it solve? Is there some epidemic of malnutrition among the children of the rich that I’m unaware of?
I don’t get it.
Free and Reduced lunch for poor kids is currently a 14 billion program. Let’s say it would be 34 billion for everyone. So say it costs $20 billion.
You have $20 billion a year in perpetuity to spend on any policy you choose.
Is free lunch for rich kids the thing you choose to spend it on? Seriously? That’s the top of somebody’s list?
There are 10 million kids in poverty. That’s $2000 per poor kid. Maybe the money would be better used on them instead?
– Vito_The_Magnificent
15.
My dad feels this way. He isn’t spiteful about it, in his mind making sure your kids are fed or a pretty basic function of a parent. To him it feels more like people trying to game the system than it does a humanitarian act.
– Governmentwatchlist
16.
When you provide something for free that people normally would provide, you disincentive people to provide it themselves. Then the people become reliant upon it. Then they lose their ability to do it themselves. Then the government holds significant power over those people. Their democratic choices now revolve around “who will keep giving me the free stuff that I can’t do without?” This disempowers people and limits their ability to be self-governing or self-sufficient. So that’s one issue.
The US government has an abysmal track record of deciding what a good diet is. A Harvard nutrition professor once told me “if you were to set out to design the worst possible diet, and create one that would lead to almost universal obesity and diabetes, it would be the US government’s Food Pyramid.” So that’s another issue, parents need to be incentivized to provide meals for their children… because it would be almost impossible for them to do a worse job than the government.
What happens in the summer or during a pandemic? We know what happens, now the government or NGO’s are required to step in and provide lunches (and often breakfast) for children not at school, because the parents no longer provide such things. So you get a whole slew of logistical complications, higher costs and more reliance on the government. It’s a bad plan for long term sustainability. It’s the opposite of how you build a strong society.
Now I certainly don’t want kids going hungry. I don’t want the complexity of having to find ways for kids from poor families to have to beg, borrow and steal to get fed at school or deal with unpaid meal bills. That’s all a pretty shitty situation as well. But from a macro perspective, I have what I believe to be legitimate concerns about what this does to the country as a whole and the dynamic by which they operate. Obviously this is only one section of life that shares this dynamic – a dynamic that leaves people endlessly more reliant on the government. And it’s a government that we know is inefficient, unreliable, bad at nutrition, and oftentimes hopelessly politically hampered in doing a proper job. It’s a system that takes more money from us every year and almost unerringly delivers equal or worse services. The end game sucks.
– brickmadness
17.
I believe lunch in school is just a bandaid solution to address economic issues that lead to poverty. I see this similarly to health coverage being an employer responsibility. I think the US needs to get into a place where some of these issues are addressed at the source of the problem not at the end of the chain.
– HoonaK
18.
OK, so in my country schools don’t give out free lunches. I don’t see this as a problem at all. Kids are supposed to bring lunch from home. Some do, some don’t. The ones that don’t usually walk to the nearby supermarket to buy something there or buy something from the school cafeteria, which is fairly inexpensive.
This fascination with school lunches in the US seems to be about an underlying problem: pervasive poverty. In my country it’s not a big deal because most families can afford homemade lunches. I would be willing to bet that the kids coming to school without lunch here have more to do with laziness than lack of money.
Source: went to school as a kid and am now a teacher.
– PremedicatedMurder
19.
Because Free is never Free. Someone is paying for it, in this case everyone. If there is a demonstrated need, then kids should have help getting lunch. This is no different than any other food assistance that we give families. People who can afford lunches should pay for them (though they shouldn’t be expensive).
– Worldly_Raccoon_479
