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Comment by rpcope1 | Hacker News Reader

Surely it can't be that expensive to just provide every child living in our country that so desires/needs it three decent meals a day, regardless of their situation? That one has always confused me, if our country is actually prosperous and powerful, that something as simple as that seems like a given that would be embarrassing not to provide.

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> something as simple as that seems like a given that would be embarrassing not to provide.

It's confusing (and embarrassing) because, in the grand scheme of government spending, it is something that could be (and should be) easily provided without any strings attached. If literal 10-year-old Richie Rich is dropped off at school in a helicopter, he should still be able to get a free lunch: that's how simple it should be. Adding means-testing of stuff like this is what cocks the whole thing up and makes it doubly expensive.

Let's assume (bad assumption, but it should be good enough for the math) that a Happy Meal™®© is a decent meal.

It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5.

https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp says there are 71 million kids.

$466 billion a year.

Ok, ok, that is maybe too high. Let's assume a wonderful world where you can produce a meal for a dollar (less than the local school district).

$77 billion a year.

The price you pay at the kiosk is not the cost of production.

Which is why I calculated an upper and lower bound. It's hard to argue it would be MORE expensive than McDonalds-for-all and hard to argue it would be much cheaper than a buck-o-meal.

Based those calculations every child could be fed for less than 10% of the DoD's annual budget of $849.8 billion.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/370341...

Apparently in 2022 the school lunch portion of the federal budget was $29 billion.

Yeah but we currently have a $2T deficit. We could do all sorts of good for "less than 10% of the DoD's annual budget", but we are already spending far more money than we bring in. The DoD's budget needs to be reduced by like 50% (along with a lot of other departments/programs) to have even a hope of getting debt under control, let alone introducing new "think of the children" expenses

If a school lunch is served for free, then parents who would have bought that lunch now get to keep the money. If we would raise taxes to fund these programs, it's possible the majority of people could actually save money.

Nothing else changing, the families who were paying for lunch would come out ahead (they lose the expense, but taxes are over EVERYONE, and most people don't have school-aged children).

>It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5.

Sure but half of that is profit, so it's a silly thing to even mention. If you are using bad faith exams intentionally, it's a good sign that your comment is being made in bad faith.

>$77 billion a year.

I'm not sure you how go to 77 billion from 71 million kids, but whatever, if that's what it costs we should do it.

71,000,000 * 3 * 365 = 7.775×10¹⁰

77,745,000,000

A dollar a meal, three times a day, three sixty five days a year. Pretty simple.

>Pretty simple.

Which is why it's silly I suppose.

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