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Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority
(newrepublic.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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i honestly have to ask here: who cares if the children of people who can afford to feed their kids benefit from this policy? means testing is dumb in basically all circumstances, you can't count on parents to do this (and if a child goes to school without a lunch they should still be able to eat!), and even if you don't care about those considerations the policy as a whole is basically a budgetary rounding error. this isn't the F-35 program, your tax dollars aren't being thrown into a black hole because someone with an income of $100,000 has a child also being fed by universal school lunch.
If you want to make that argument, great! I pretty much agree. What's deeply upsetting to me is that this entire comment section is willfully misrepresenting the move as "haha they want children to starve". I guarantee you that everyone here will also claim to be super concerned about how far political rifts have become. Republicans do a lot of awful shit but this is just choosing to characterize people as deeply cruel villains for the sake of entertainment. I can't blame "casual conservatives" from looking at responses like this and deciding that their characterization of the left as overzealous is completely true.
okay but they kinda do. you are giving charitability to people (Republican politicians in Congress) who have clearly demonstrated they do not deserve it and that what they want is for people to be worse off--whether they accept that or not. more children starving because free school meals are restricted to certain income groups is possibly the most straightforward cause-and-effect outcome there can be. the benefits of having them (without means testing) are also undisputable. we literally just had those for two years without issue during the pandemic.
No, see, this is a willful mischaracterization of their ignorance. These are people who are convinced that parents who can afford their feed their children just will if they lack other options. The idea that some would simply choose not to anyways or that means testing is often faulty is further than they've ever actually thought about it. Still cartoonishly evil? Yeah, but it's not "haha I sure do love kids not eating", it's a lack of empathy of a different sort. Telling people that they want children to starve when that's the last thing that probably crossed their mind will never, ever sway someone's understanding of a problem. It will only convince them that your position is based on a strawman. We need to appeal to people's sense that they're good people who want to do good things.
too bad? literally just don't advocate for policy that'll starve children if you don't want to be accused of making children starve--again, we had universal, non-means tested meals in this arena for two years and nobody complained about it then. if you're the type of person who objects now, i don't think that's worth coddling--i think it's worth begin honest, which is that it's a policy that leads to more starving children and it's a deeply inhuman policy overall. you should feel bad for agreeing with it as a person.
as for this legislatively: me trying to nicely appeal to a Republican legislator is never going to make them see reason here and not starve children. these people are bad, their policy is worse, and trying to coddle them in particular is a waste of time. they know what they're doing.
This whole reply makes me even more negative towards the future of humanity than I was. Discourse like this is exactly why things are as bad as they are.