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.
