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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

>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.

Georgia resident here.

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

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.

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?

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