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Comment by thinkingtoilet | Hacker News Reader

It's astonishing this is a thing. I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free with no questions asked. Where I live, kids can get breakfast too, however I've heard that isn't universal in the state.

The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here that are suffering. I have a brother with disabilities and there are "lines" drawn all the time with funding that are either all or nothing. If you cross a line, you lose funding. It encourages them to work less, save less money, and be more reliant on state funding. Why haven't we figured out gradients yet? For example, above this line you get 90% of costs covered. Above this line 80%. Above this line 70%. etc... etc... etc...

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Gradients introduce a tremendous measurement problem.

It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth).

This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system.

There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)

Oh, and there's the deadweight loss of those who would qualify for a benefit (under law) but fail either to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops, or who do hoop-jump, but are still denied benefits, whether through bureaucratic error, inefficiency, corruption, or other reasons.

TFA describes the first circumstance.

Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:

Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>).

Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...>

Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.

I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).

I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:

- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.

- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.

Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.

During COVID, school lunch was free, and most school served free bag lunches over the summer too. That ended in June 2022. Congress could've kept it going for a pittance, but alas...

That's what happened in MA. It was COVID that started the program and then we kept it up because we're decent people.

A lot of the country, majorities in many states, are not decent people.

State government, local government, and local philanthropy (like the chamber of commerce, etc.) could also buy lunch.

I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.

My significant other work at a school during Covid where they were giving free breakfasts and lunches. The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in. The staff always wanted to err on the side of caution, because they didn’t want any kids to miss out. We’re talking sometimes over 200 lunches that were discarded in a day. Some things could be reused, but a lot was thrown away. It was against the rules to do anything but either give them to a student, or throw them away.

It sounds like there were a few problems identified.

* Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window)

* Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable

* No system of reservation to try to forecast load

There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.

These problems aren't easy to solve.

The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.

The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten".

The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.

>The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.

This, food waste is built into the system. It'd be nice if it wasn't but every restaurant and cafeteria throws away just as much food as they sell, most people just don't realize it because they've never worked in food service.

>The waste I witnessed from it all was atrocious, due to the fluctuations from day-to-day how many students would come in.

The waste is just a necessary component even in for profit systems. It's still better to feed everyone than to not. Even if the only thing you are allowed to do is to give to students, then you send them home with several meals worth to use up the leftovers.

It was a really nice time. One less chore to worry about every night.

This is a problem. If you roll out a program to deal with an extraordinary circumstance, some people think it should go on forever even when the extraordinary circumstance is over. They think it should be a welfare benefit forever.

Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.

No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.

I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.

>to deal with temporary problems

Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.

Haven't you met people who refused a raise because they were scared of moving to a new tax bracket? Same thing only this is where it actually happens.

The only people that do this are ones that have no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.

Which is a surprisingly large percentage of the population.

Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free.

Most people like receiving a big fat refund.

Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.

Is it? There are situations where it makes sense to avoid a rise and stay in the tax bracket. Like if with 5k rise you loose a 10k childcare benefits provided by local municipality.

Yes, the anecdote about misunderstanding a particular thing may be broken if you introduce additional factors.

The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.

That's not tax brackets though, that's income. Talking about tax brackets is weirdly indirect way to talk about income. The people who avoid raises because they think they'll be taxed higher on all their income because they don't understand how brackets work aren't the same people who avoid raises because it'll cause them to earn too much to be eligible for government assistance programs.

> no understanding of marginal tax rates and progressive taxation.

Which is how some parts of US taxation works, but not other parts. You seem to be in one part, and unaware of the rest.

(And is a mix of taxation and other "eligibility" issues, with poorly advertised massive cliffs here and there for extra helpfulness).

There may be some cases--if a person is on the edge of being eligible for SNAP, or for SSDI for a dependent adult in their houshold, where getting a raise might actually make them poorer. It's wrong to say people do this because they're too stupid to know about marginal tax rates.

My state fixed this so the marginal rate was never over 100%, but there is a rather wide range where the marginal rate is about 75%. For every dollar you earn, you keep 25¢, and are paying in 75¢ in the form of getting fewer refundable tax credits, food stamps, energy bill assistance, and so on. (If I include the energy bill assistance, the marginal rate is 85% in a few bands.)

And there may be many unrelated programs that fully cut funding at nearly the same level, making it a compounding problem. You might lose several benefits the moment your household income moves from 149% of poverty level to 151%, for instance.

But, also, that's because there isn't one monolithic agency that's in charge of all benefits... and that may be a good thing.

"It's astonishing this is a thing."

Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.

Free education means no one will value it. Education should not be free, just cheap. However there should be help and assistance to people who wants to get an education but cannot afford it.

Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.

"Free education means no one will value it"

Ridiculous.

Of course, if it's free, then it's just the default, and some people will strive to be better than 'the masses' and pay for private education.

But in any case, your whole society gets decently educated, which makes everyone richer, in every way.

I'm from a country where university degree can be easily obtained for free. As a result:

1. Students usually are not interested in attending classes, like at the middle school. 2. Bachelor/masters degrees means nothing as everyone has one.

There's a big difference between 'degree for free' and 'education for free' I think.

One is just worthless paper, the other is equal opportunity for everyone to actually attain the standard required for a degree.

But education without a degree already is free and accessible for everyone everywhere where internet is. Free courses, free books, free lessons!

During my student years I could only dream of attending lectures from Stanford or MIT! Nowadays they are at your fingertips anytime you want.

America provides food stamps that provide groceries to those who need it.

However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".

I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.

I didn't say free restaurants for everyone, that's a ridiculous extrapolation.

But it is the responsibility of a decent modern society to ensure kids get at least a basic level of care and education. Morally, and in fact in the interests of having a decently educated and functional society.

For foodstamp groceries, are you expecting the kids to prepare their own lunch? It seems like another callous 'personal responsibility' argument.

Our "decent modern society" already does this, because the government SNAP program guarantees that anyone for whom the standard food budget is not met by their income receives government support.

Groceries, however, are expected to be bought by parents and then meals prepared for their children. I don't expect children to prepare their own lunch, but I do expect their parents to - and the same for breakfast, dinner, and snacks. I consider not doing this to be a rather serious form of child neglect. Correcting this problem would be another responsibility of a "decent, modern society", although usually the best way to do that is to require parents to go to parenting classes and get help to overcome their neglect.

Again, just provide the kids themselves with decent (not stratified) meals, rather than tying it to parental responsibility or otherwise. It's like you're trying to make a mean society.

How are children in such situations supposed to get breakfast and dinner?

I'm not arguing against universal school lunches here. I am arguing against the idea society should somehow be providing prepared meals, unless "society" includes "children's parents".

At least they'll get a decent lunch, regardless of their domestic situation.

[flagged]

Except it does the opposite, because it disincentives you from raising your income above that line.

The goal isn’t to make it easy for you to escape the system but more difficult under the theory that then you’re more self sufficient. It’s a stupid philosophy of course.

Strawmen usually have stupid philosophies, yes.

The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.

> everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports

Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).

Because there is only room for 1 gold medal. Only room for 1 silver medal. This is in Pool, which almost a best case scenario for women to beat men and yet, in the UK, its two former men gunning for gold and silver.

https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn...

If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.

Sports governing bodies in the UK are rapidly rewriting their policies to stop these men from competing in women's sports, after a recent Supreme Court judgement ruled this amounts to unlawful sex discrimination against women. So hopefully this ongoing insult to all the women who've worked so hard to compete in their sport of choice will soon be over.

That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.

This is a morally correct and minimum acceptable response. Leagues must admit they were wrong (probably impossible), and mail out letters and trophies (trivial).

These governing bodies need to Do Better. They need to work on themselves.

I'll go back to there is ONE out of TEN THOUSAND so why is this an issue trumping healthcare and the economy?

If you put a man into a game of finding the best person out of 10,000 women, you're going to find the man at the championship. This isn't a per capita or population scale thing. Competitions are intensely personal games.

Sports are a big part of American culture and smugly ruining them with nonsense makes Americans mad. This is not difficult to understand.

Having sex the night before a competition can increase your testosterone levels, a known performance enhancing chemical.

Should we ban sex for athletes? At a high school level?

Testosterone levels fluctuate more on a minute by minute scale with such activities rather than a day by day scale. We should ban exogenous testosterone use, and we already do.

Men and women are not the same. They are a distinct, binary grouping. One cannot measure up to the metrics, characteristics, etc of the other. Women have their own sports leagues because of this. Men do not have exclusive leagues, its illegal in most western countries anyway under discrimination laws. Women just cant compete at these levels though. Thats not a moral judgement but a plain reading of the facts.

As far as the incoming remark about "controlling what high school students do in private with each other", I will rather present you with a question:

Should we make it impossible for thousands of girls to get a gold medal, XOR allow 1 person, born a male and currently pretending/presenting as a woman, to dominate the competition? This is the actual, real life decision that leagues of all kinds must make, from football to chess.

The problem is that sharp drop offs instead of gradients are a known and well documented problem as is the desire to get rid of the welfare state by one party. You don’t need to assume best intentions here when the GOP has consistently made it clear where their priorities lie on this topic. Oh and the GOP has constantly taken “starve the beast” and weaponized incompetence approaches to try and kill the programs they don’t like.

That’s okay, because “teaches you self-reliance” is just a fig leaf. They don’t care if it actually happens or not, the point is to have something to point to, so when they’re criticized they can hit back with “Why are you against people learning self-reliance? Why do you want them to be dependent on the government?”

If only those people knew the hardships some people face with mental issues which hinder their ability to function normally on a day to day basis. Some people cant pull themselves out of bed let alone their bootstraps.

The types of people who are against these social safety nets don't care. Unfortunately, they will only care if it directly affects them.

These people hold the mindset that if you are not disabled and don't have any learning disabilities, you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

There isn't any room for nuance with them, they will just call people who are neurodivergent "lazy" and "welfare queens".

"never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence"

I'm pretty sure this is malice. They know, they don't do anything.

It's way too simple to categorize behavior like this into good/evil. It's a worthwhile thought experiment (and habit) to assume that everyone is trying to do the right thing, and try to understand how they might come to a different viewpoint than you.

Sorry, but my imagination is clearly not robust enough to even begin to steelman a policy that puts children into debt over near zero-cost food at school, often publicly humiliating the child at the same time, without just sounding like a cruel cartoon villain.

I don't believe any of this, but I'll try. Please note that the below is not my personal belief, just an attempt to understand the "other side":

The attempt to steelman the policy probably comes down to encouraging personal responsibility (the libertarian way). Forgiving debts without consequence promote a culture of non-payment, undermining the sustainability of school meal programs.

The steelmanned version of why lunches require payment is likely down to sustainability of the program in general (ie: school budgets are already stretched to the limit, so parent contributions are necessary).

Now, this could obviously be solved by just budgeting for the entire thing to be included in the overall taxes of the state, but then you've got to surpass the hurdle of tax raises being insanely difficult in the states.

Honestly, this exercise kind of makes me see (yet again) how broken the whole USAmerican system is. "I've got mine and I don't want to give any more away for something I don't need"

OK, so you endorse a policy which not only creates human suffering now but harms society and creates more human suffering in the future. The cost of fixing it is minuscule and outweighed by the future benefits.

What are the good faith arguments in favor of this?

- ignorance

- lack of critical reasoning skills

- religion

- sadism

- ?

How did they give you the impression they were endorsing this?

Because that’s who we’re talking about?

I absolutely don't endorse it. I just find it counterproductive to say things like "malice is the point".

I do have trouble finding good faith arguments in favor of this policy. It is cruel. But the people who decided to implement it aren't "other". They're humans who think they're good people (aside from a small minority of people who really don't care) and much as we'd like to think so we're not that different than them. If we can understand their justification, that's a step toward actually convincing them there is another way. And yes, I have changed many people's viewpoints with this level of patience, not everyone is too stupid/mean/insult of your choice to change their minds.

assuming good will is the only way to get others to listen and eventually change their mind. because only if we have good will in common we are able to come to a solution that satisfies both sides.

it's the continuous assumption of malice that prevents people from listening to each other. and that is still the case even if there is actual malice. almost by definition, if you do not present the assumption for good will to the other side, they will have difficulty attributing good will to you, no matter whether they themselves are acting are maliciously or not.

I didn’t mean you personally.

The people who decided to implement the policy believe that cruelty will create deterrence.

Persisting in this line of thinking despite centuries of cruelty and no end to the undesired behavior is what leads to sayings like “the cruelty is the point.” Psychologically, it’s well understood there are those who really get a kick out of making people suffer.

I really wish people would exercise more imagination while applying the adage.

A cafeteria worker is likely doing what they're told to do from the principal and board of education. They're doing what they're told because of laws that have been passed. At any point along this chain of human beings, someone could be relying on their job to keep one of them family members alive.

I know I'm throwing out a random scenario, and that doesn't make it true, but there IS a story here, and it is one that none of us will ever know. There are so many human things that happen that people attribute directly to malice, especially when they have very little information.

Anyways. Point is. I really have a hard time blaming any individual here (except perhaps lawmakers) no matter how depressing the whole fiasco is. It is simply another unfortunate consequence of rigid policies that have serious impact.

>I really wish people would exercise more imagination while applying the adage.

It will never happen because additional analyzing would pretty quickly make it obvious that the problems are systemic and cannot be easily described by the kind of partisan quips and advocacy for "obvious" or "easy" solutions that dominate discussion of topics like this.

Basically any serious effort to understand and solve these problems precludes general audience participation and will therefore not be popular.

I think everyone understands the lawmakers (and by extension the voters) are to blame.

Have you started a local movement to pay for kids schools lunches? If not, should we assume its due to malice as you know there is a problem and "don't do anything"?

I don't live in America, I just watch from the sidelines, sad at the state of the world's leader failing to be rational about most every social issue.

Individually managed efforts doesn’t scale.

If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.

> If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.

On the contrary. Many people favor individually managed efforts because they disagree with your premise, and believe that such efforts scale better than centrally managed ones.

That doesn’t match any definition of scale.

They favor individual efforts because they don’t want certain groups being helped.

if feels like all too often malice is hidden behind the veil of incompetence.

There have been so many studies as to why... I mean basically the entire social safety net in the United States, back to front, doesn't work at all for any of it's stated goals, that anyone who still believes this is the way it should be run, just wants poor people to suffer. Or they're too lazy to read.

There is deep, culturally entrenched ideas here about how wealth is equated to goodness and righteousness, signs of $diety's blessings on you, etc. etc. and nobody, absolutely nobody is trying to unwind that. It's as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.

"any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"

>Because cruelty is the point for some people.

It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system. Though obviously people who personally are ok with or like that will be better represented in such a system.

> Or said in their parlance, it teaches you self reliance or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Rephrased another way you're basically saying "it's not my team doing that, it's the other team." And this is exactly the kind of divisive garbage that perpetuates the system.

What these systems teach in practice is "don't you dare step an inch out of line, no, intent doesn't matter, out of line is out of line and will be punished" which in a perverse way is exactly the kind of thing government schools will wind up teaching because every bit you make those future adults more likely to comply will pay dividends in reduced enforcement over their lives. Support for that sort of crap generally crosses party lines, as does opposition.

> It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system.

The rules of the system are made by people. And yes, for quite some of them the cruelty is the point when making the rules.

That's right. "The system" didn't just appear out of nowhere. It's built by people--increasingly built by people who believe the government should be used as a tool to exact cruelty and humiliation on outgroups they don't like.

> It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system.

I'd argue that recent elections demonstrate enough of the people _are_ voting cruelty.

It's rarely cruelty. It's usually bureaucracy and unintended consequences and trying to be "nice".

Often you have a program created, with "free below X, sliding scale until no subsidy at Y" - done right, this is "perfect" in that each marginal dollar is lightly "taxed" (losing a subsidy is the same as a tax, from the worker's perspective).

This is great! Though let's say (theoretically) that the end result is a 1% "tax" for our family, so each dollar they increase income costs them a penny of subsidy. They probably have other subsidies besides school lunches, like WIC, or ACA, or whatever. Those are also sliding down at various amounts, which can cause it to start to get annoying. But it works.

Then the program is expanded, to be "nice" - even nicer! Now the subsidy is 100% below X, but they're going to also cover 100% up to Y! That's great! Everyone is better off now ... except now you have the situation where at Y + 1, you earned one more dollar, but lost potentially thousands in subsidy. This is NOT ACTUALLY WORSE than before, because at Y + 1 in both scenarios you have no subsidy, but it hurts much more in the second because the subsidy wasn't slowly being drained.

While this is generally true of a certain American political party, you see hard cutoff lines even in states like Massachusetts, where the majority of voters and politicians seem to be actively trying to make things better for people.

The real answer is that gradients are hard, and clear lines are easy. A shocking number of Americans don't understand how our income tax brackets work; they believe that if you cross the line into a higher income bracket, your entire income is taxed at that new, higher rate, and you end up losing money overall.

Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.

> Massachusetts ... also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.

The math wasn't "hard" - it was wrong. The decision process was to be instant runoff voting, which has significant problems. IRV is basically what people stuck in the two party mindset think they want so they can express support for a third party. But once a third party gains enough traction to become viable, perverse incentives (strategic voting) shows right back up again. What we really need is Ranked Choice ballots with Ranked Pairs decision process. This satisfies Condorcet which means that a winner is preferred by the majority of voters.

Or just multi-member districts with a proportional system like STV..

I'd definitely take that as well, but it's a much bigger change. Especially of deep government dynamics like how singular executives then get chosen by the representatives.

You’re making the mistake assuming a political party is flawless or that a political party having power somehow obviates the need to be responsive to constituents who might take issue or be swayed to take issue with the policy changes you try to enact.

People like the ones I described exist in both parties but I think it’s telling that people assumed I’m talking about one political party because it made those slogans it’s brand. The hard lines vs gradient doesn’t make sense in terms of public because this doesn’t raise to the level of public discourse.

Also Massachusetts is a bad example because they enacted free lunches across the board. They may have gradient issues in other welfare programs but school lunches is something they’ve solved for now.

As for RCV being shot down, I don’t think it’s an education issue. I personally prefer approval voting as it’s simpler to explain and faster results. Not wanting to switch to RCV (specifically IRV) can have all sorts of reasons and claiming it’s because the electorate is dumb is the wrong take I think.

> Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.

That's the ostensible reason - the reality is that Blue MAGA also really hates power challenges. Look no further than CA where they also shot down (even the possibility for local elections to consider) ranked choice voting.

>I'm thankful to live in Massachusetts where all kids can get lunch for free

What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?

The cost of living isn't a single number. A state like Massachusetts, with a high cost of living for people with high income living in or near Boston, can also have large social services, like subsidized housing, good-quality public education, free healthcare, and free school lunches.

It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.

the cool thing about cost of living is taxes tend to track cost of living, so the ability for government to pay for school lunches is likely similar anywhere.

In Texas, schools are primarily funded through property taxes. That means wealthy neighborhoods have well funded schools that can easily afford free lunches, poor neighborhoods do not.

The thing I find more hilarious even than the -4 that my original comment got, is that I wasn't talking about taxes, but "cost of living". I was under the mistaken impression that the term refers to the cost of groceries, housing, fuel, utilities, and so forth, rather than taxes. But I must have touched a nerve. Guess they don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing.

No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.

Georgia resident here.

Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.

Why do you ask?

Because it's strange to call the lunches free, when it costs so much to live there. If I (for some reason) wanted to move to Massachusetts to live there for the rest of my life, you know, for those "free school lunches"... how much would those cost me? Turns out that it's alot. And it's magical thinking to suggest that for people already living there that the cost is zero, they're already paying that cost and have been for a long while. I can't prove it, but these free school lunches are probably really expensive.

Do you think I that I think that the lunches magically appear and cost $0?

Do you use the word "free" to describe them? Do you use that word ("free") even to mean that the recipient of the lunch gets the lunch for no cost at all?

Gradients would impose a significant burden on the bureaucracy. It's already complicated enough to figure out where a person's unique circumstances place them on various thresholds. Add gradients and the complexity grows exponentially. The net result would be a 100x increase in the number of public servants.

why? income number input results in output number of support. or you know it could just be a of their part time income % with a fixed min and max. or something like a reverse income tax.

I don't think you should be getting downvoted, you are right. I don't think it's "100x more", but more complicated rules require more resources dedicated to their management.

It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.

The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.

100x? I think this deserves a bit of a deeper insight. The inputs are the same, which means the verification steps are also exactly the same. The only change might be volume, but I highly doubt it would be 100x.

Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.

Gradients can impose a burden, but they can also be simple enough to just "run with" - and many of them that are already gradient-based are.

They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.

You can reapply whenever your income changes (and generally you are obligated to report such). At least in my state, the system to do so is mostly automated, although they do have a caseworker manually review such things. A good deal of people who receive government benefits aren't filing taxes at all, and they qualify for programs based on other proof, like a pay stub.

I think steep gradients are OK, as long as they are not over 100%. When someone is working and earning very little, they need all the help they can get. As they earn more, they need less help, and should start to shift to instead contributing to helping others. There is probably some ideal "ramp" that provides the right set of incentives. I think 75% is probably too high.

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