You need to think like a libertarian. “If they’re all getting free food they’re all stealing because taxes are theft.”

Thi budget has the word “Biiden” in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words “woke ideology”. Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.

The line “Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs” just cracks me up. “People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don’t like”.

I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.

The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.

corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns

And the military-industrial-complex, which is sort of all-of-the-above, yeah. It’s got waste, corruption, criminality (see Boeing), and “bad finance” (meaning public debt finance of any sort) from top to bottom, through and through, yet Republicans can’t get enough of it. Starving a kid is fighting “socialism”, but starving a socialized military or a defense offense contractor of a penny … now that can’t be tolerated.

Because feeding and supporting children doesn’t get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.

Cruelty is the point.

Split the war budget 50/50, with half going to school lunches and the rest going into guillotines.

Divine rage.

I worked a breakfast grill at a restaurant as a teen and got pretty good at it. I’ll make that kid the most perfect breakfast omelette they’ve ever eaten. And I’ll bring the ingredients if we’re short.

Also worked @a food pantry not long ago, warehouse work mostly but I got to see some of the parents and kids who showed up, long lines out into the northern cold, every day we were open, just to get a day or two’s worth of something to eat.

Anyone who would means-test a kid out of a free school meal, or deny them altogether, is some kind of sociopath monster.

I’ll volunteer if you’re around me lmao

They like the wealthy, most happen to be white males but white men that aren’t rich people that don’t donate to them can use their boot straps. They care about that demographic at elections and most are willing to vote against their interests.

Except white men and controlling the rest, hence the support for a dumb wall

I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it’s simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.

So this is especially evil to me.

Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.

A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn’t realize that most of these kids didn’t have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week… Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.

These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things.

This is actually the best argument against what they are doing. I fully support not paying for other kids food when they dont need it, but if we spend a trillion on military every year, they dont care about fiscal conservatism.

They care about nobody. What was the last Republican sponsored bill that would objectively make anyone’s life better?

Somehow they have their base frothing at the mouth about these Democrat-led initiatives that help folks (not just Democrats), yet they put forth no proposal to help anyone.

They are the party of taking things away from people not like them, but also the party of taking things away from people just like them. They are not the party of helping anyone. I cannot fathom how the large portion of their base who could be helped by such programs fails to see this.

That’s because the problem from their perspective is that the people who would defraud public services exist, and their rage is high enough that they accept the people who simply use public services as collateral damage.

Bah, who am I kidding… They don’t care about humans. They’re just interested in that money going towards private businesses (Especially if they have a generous lobbyist from and/or stake in said business or industry)

You don’t want to invest in stopping fraud here. The investment costs more than you’d get back, no one is making bank stealing free school lunch. We conceded this before and made life worse for millions of people.

You do want to invest in stopping corporate fraud, because the investments pay off there.

The problem is that any system that involves humans will have some level of waste and corruption. So they will always be able to point to that one kid who got a lunch he wasn’t supposed to as a sign that the whole system should be destroyed.