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 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.
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.
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.
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
Such is the tragedy of the commons.
We are to celebrate those who get out of paying taxes by any means and looking the other way when others take from the commons.
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?
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?
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
It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
(1) not actually me, since I'm not a US citizen just a pro-Russia bot.
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.
Millions and millions for apps and taps and other worthless junk is annoying, and the recovery barely pays for the machines, let alone the lines.
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.
> I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.
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.
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.
Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024:
https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070...
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.
https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost...
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.
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 %.
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 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
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.
It is a USDA program: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep
I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...
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.
Penny Rich Dollar Poor.