Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
Without reading into lunch specifically, I'd very much be inclined to say yes.
The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on.
I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money.
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".
A solution that I have seen implemented and discussed is a flat, very low fare. High enough to keep people off public transit that are disrespectful of it, but low enough to allow almost anyone to take it thus increasing ridership. An added bonus is when using a transit card to tap on and off, the statistics of ridership are still readily available for governments to better plan infrastructure.
If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.
Here in Queensland we just paid $400 million for a ticketing system that is now used entirely for 50c tickets. The marketing line is that the fee is necessary for analytics, but the cynic in me says that it's probably a combination of secret contract negotiations with a pay-per-tap component, and sunk cost fallacy.
I've not been in a place with a functional transit system where fares were high enough to prevent disruptive people from boarding. I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
Even before the bots, I remember MvM being unplayable if you weren't with enough friends to make votekick impossible (and that wouldn't stop them from trying, but they'd ragequit themselves when no one votes yes, and leave you down a player).
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.
The question was asking if making them free actually saved the government money. I provided an anecdote suggesting that this might very well be the case, by providing an example of a place where the government is burning money in order to collect less money than they burned.
Wrong. The question asked the opposite; it asked if the means testing saved the government money.
You answered "yes" in your original comment, but your supporting arguments imply "no" so I can see why people are confused.
Read the original question again:
>Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
The specific problem is that the alternative in the case of school lunches does not involve upgrading the payment system. Just because transit might benefit in the short term from not upgrading doesn’t mean school lunches would.
TBH I’m a little skeptical of the payment system story, it sounds oversimplified and might be agenda driven. All our transit systems need payment system maintenance and upgrades over time. Riders want & demand tap to pay, for example. All costs cut into and balance against incomes, but that doesn’t mean they can opt out, nor that it will save taxpayers in the long run. Keeping the old payment system might have rising costs and lead to reduced ridership over time, costs which may not have been assumed in the story you shared. I doubt the payment system is very significant compared to train cars, rails, crossing lights & gates, employees, etc.
We tend to cherry-pick and arm-chair debate individual budget items without seeing the big picture, in order to justify the preconceived claim that governments are bad at spending. Making families pay for school lunches is pretty funny when taxpayers pay for the building, books, teachers, and janitorial and food staff, the sum of which is literally thousands of times more than lunch. Debating the funding of school lunches is missing the forest for the trees, right?
Hi, your last point makes me think that we’re in agreement that it’s not worth making students pay for lunch.
As for your other points, without annualizing it’s actually a fairly significant line item — their budget is about 3 billion. Annualized it’s not as bad, but that is hardly relevant as the fact of the matter is it costed 934 billion. Why did cost that much? My best answer is that a bid was held and cubic transportation systems won. This does not mean that the price was reasonable, only that cubic won. As for the new income, yes, that’s true. Trains will run slightly faster as people can board on many doors above ground (free system also does this). Ridership may increase thanks to tap to pay. I discuss this. But they also have, on numerous occasions, drastically overestimated the new revenue. Newer estimates show that the systems enable more fare evasion than before, cutting into profits.
My best guess as to why is mismanagement. After this was approved the MBTA’s management was overhauled for being a circus.
If you want to write a data driven counter argument, I would be more than happy to link to it at the top of my piece and offer rebuttals
LA is upgrading its fare collection systems because the alternative is for the rail cars to become homeless hotels.
Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.
In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.
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.
At some point we have to face the truth that the only well organized and ran country in the world is Singapore. European governments had barely any right influence and they manage to evolve their own disfunction quite well. It seems that for some reasons the states after WWII just lost their capacity to build things. If you watch Oppenheimer - one of the things in the background is how staggeringly competent were the administrative guys. There is no such things now. Any government project both big and small is expected to be cost overrun, delayed and if ever finished is a cointoss if it will make things better or worse. It is a global malaise.
While I do not deny that this might very well be a problem, it feels fallacious on the part of the American public.
One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.
Yes, 100%. Another 'me-ism' I've been thinking a lot about recently is the collective unwillingness to ensure short term pain in exchange for long term prosperity, for instance in regard to climate policy. Likewise, there is no intuitive fix, especially when such prosperity will mostly extend to future generations.
> 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.
It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report.
So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
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.
Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.
In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.
This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.
No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.
In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
> Not quite. The argument then becomes about pointing out that our accounting systems are stupid, brutish and terrible at modelling second order consequences - social, economic, even moral.
Are you disagreeing with me, or just reframing the discussion? Pick one mode of discussion, please, I find it hard to follow if you start off disagreeing but then switch gears and decide to reframe the discussion.
I encourage you to speak as much as you want about the fact that our accounting system sucks at dealing with externalities. However, we are still slaves to accounting, somewhat. Nobody rational expects a fridge to be a profit source. But if you take taxes, people expect an accounting of how the taxes are spent. “This program costs money but has benefits that outweigh the cost” is pretty easy to understand. The program doesn’t pay for itself because we don’t have a way to put better outcomes on the books.
We also don’t have an accounting system that lets me show a net positive for buying a movie ticket.
the problem is that "it pays for itself" is true in the overall societal sense, where a few more kids don't end up in jail or psych wards or something, but there's no way for the school to capture that value when deciding "do we want to feed kids at school?" and so we usually don't do it :/
It is worth keeping in mind that the broader effects might still be positive. But, I think the original poster was just asking about the direct cost of determining who gets the free lunches (that’s why they frame it in terms of the overhead).
While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
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.)
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?
You’re comparing the NY state education budget against a program for elementary school students in NYC using numbers from different decades.
If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
Which decades? Are you saying the $5M number is too small because this article was from 2017, and I used budget from 2024? Okay, the NY state budget in 2017 was a bit over $25B. That actually still leaves the answer at two hundredths of one percent, since I rounded up and left lots of room for error. ;)
I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%.
> I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right?
You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less.
These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
I see the problem is I used your $5M number which is NYC, and divided by the state budget. However, I don’t think the $5M number is referring to the total cost of providing lunch, and that’s what you’re comparing it to in your calculation. Apples, oranges. Because the schools are already providing free and subsidized lunches, the additional cost isn’t that much and I’m not off by a factor of 150. I am wrong, but not by that much. And I still stand by what I said - even if the total addition cost is 3%, which it’s not, and even if I was off by 150x, which I’m not, the outcome still points at lunch being cheap in the big picture. And even if it does cost more, it doesn’t explain why we’ve decided to make families pay directly for lunch when we provide all the rest, right? I am agreeing with your top point that we (the US) ought to just provide the lunch as part of the elementary school education.
I was replying to an “it pays for itself” comment and looking for the most favorable possible numbers for the most limited incremental change to the program, to show that even then, it doesn’t pay for itself. That’s where the $5M comes from—it’s the incremental cost, to the city, of providing free lunches to an additional 35,000 elementary school students, after the federal government reimburses $3.24 per lunch, using data from 2015.
I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.
The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.
I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
I agree with you that the cost of lunch food adds up and is more than the cost of accounting. Substantial is a subjective word but true if looking at the number by itself, and feeding 2 million kids in NY state will obviously be a big number compared to most people’s salaries, which is why it seems substantial. But it’s still a small fraction of the cost of education, and food is a single line item in a much much bigger budget. We can’t actually separate the lunch costs, when you include the cafeteria. It seems very strange that we don’t ask families to pay for books or bus rides but do ask them to pay for lunch. It very much feels like a conscious choice to ensure the poor kids are identified.
There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.
The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.
I feel like there's the administrative overhead, but also every child having food when they are learning is sure to be a profound positive externality. The only outcome of having kids to go to school hungry or receive substandard education is keeping the poorer classes of society "in their place." This is very gross.
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.
You shouldn't have to measure the fact that feeding children does good, and you should push back against anybody who thinks you should (because they clearly don't want all children to eat, a strong signal of fucked up morality).
This so much. My HCOL area uses a hybrid approach: kids can always eat regardless and can run up huge $$$ tabs. The parents get pestered once it gets over a few hundred.
I absolutely agree, I cannot comprehend why there's even a discussion in the USA for not providing free hot meals for students. Running tabs, pestering parents, all of that sounds absurd for a very simple moral answer: yes, kids should have access to food in schools, no matter their wealth status. I don't even care about richer parents getting free food for their kids at school, all kids should be treated the same.
> 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.
This is an understatement. Florida's unemployment system for example was designed intentionally to fail when too many people tried to file for benefits to prevent them from having to pay out. This of course blew up into a whole scandal during covid when a bunch of people were suddenly unemployed and all tried filing at the same time which is how it officially came out that the system was designed from the start to function like this.
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".
This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody".
They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch.
I would say yes. In our state all public school kids are eligible for free lunch by just signing up. What's the worst that can happen? Some parents who could afford lunch get it for free? I'd rather my tax dollars go to that than going to a whole bureaucracy designed to ensure that only those who "deserve" it get it.
As far as "rich people are getting free lunches!!!" argument. 1) rich people for the most part send their kids to private, not public schools. 2) rich people who can afford better lunches than the school lunch are going to send their kid to school with a lunch.
