You know, I tough it might be good to fact-check this screenshot. It might be missrepresenting something. So I did a little digging and it turns out that this is based on a document provided by the Republican Study Committee (about three quateres of house rebuplicans are members).
I read the Dokument document (you can find it here) and HOLY HELL THIS IS THE WORST THING I HAVE READ IN A LONG WHILE.
It's so full of lies, half-truths and so, so, so much finger pointing to the "woke socialist Biden Administration" (yes, that is a quote), so removed from reality... It was painfull to read. There is so much utter nonsense in that one document.
Anyhow. The headline is dead on. And it's far far from the worst thing that they are proposing.
I need to bang my head against a wall now untill i have erased the memory of reading this bullshit.
It's all about elimination of all federal regulations:
Rep. Bill Posey’s (R-FL) Article I Restoration Act, which would sunset all regulations after 3 years.
Require the federal government to have a “yellow pages test.” If a good or service can be found in the
“yellow pages,” government should not be doing it.[14]
Fucking dinosaurs don't realize that they haven't even printed a yellow pages in around a decade. Last time I received one it was like 30 pages long for a major city.
Talk about pandering to their elderly base. Most Gen Z probably don't even know what a "yellow pages" is.
Require the federal government to have a “yellow pages test.” If a good or service can be found in the “yellow pages,” government should not be doing it.[14]
Yes, specifically the business phone book. The residential one was the "white pages" -a weird book that was mysteriously left on your porch every few years where everyone's home phone (those strange bulky ones that were attached to the wall) and home address was listed. That's what people mean in old movies when they say "I'm in the book!" It means "You know my name, you can find my phone number if you want to call me."
I think we got one every year actually at my old rental house. We would get a white and yellow pages. Strangely, yellow pages would shrink every year until around 2012 it was about 30 pages long.
You had to pay to be in the yellow pages, so as googling stuff became the main way to find anything, businesses that weren't mainly patronized by old people started opting out.
The yellow pages test comes from a dead libertarian Austrian "Economist". Kinda interesting since he died in 1995 and the school of economics he followed was already obsolete when it came out in the 1930s.
This stuff is part of the reason why age does matter in elected office. People get ideas and they don't let them go even long after they have been disproven.
Because of the similarities between Republicans and the UK Conservative party, I am 100% convinced this is a collaborated narrative. They have collectively decided on which levers to pull and push because of data they have at hand. Some people have no moral compass at all when it comes to making money. And let's face it, this is purely about backhanders and donation funding.
https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/about/ is the main link imo. Phil Moorhouse said in one of his videos that this is heavily funded by the Republican party. I cannot find that video though. I also cannot find a link with these and Murdoch. It very much looks like the UK Tories are copying the Republicans. The way they have abused the UK is no where near as bad as the stunts of the Republicans over there.
Brexit is by far one of the worst political stunts inflicted upon the UK I could possibly imagine. Losing the right to live and work in an entire continent worth of cultures and economies -- sure, here in the US has a problem with guns, women as equals, "God and Country" white nationalism in every mega church across the nation, and American Exceptionalism, etc., but Brexit is a whole other level of stupidity.
But that is exactly what they are counting on. We need more angry informed people instead of the angry idiots that lap this up because "woke is bad" but can't explain what woke is.
Woke = anything you disagree with.
I understand discouraging it, as the free school lunches were shit and are shit that is barely edible, but banning it seems wrong. There are some places where there are kids who will eat the disgusting whatever it is they pulled from the dumpster behind the school, but I don't think most people would want to.
But also from the quotes you provided, I doubt it's about that...
I was one of the kids that received free lunch at school growing up. No, it wasn’t my favorite food but it was a meal that I would not have had otherwise. It was free lunch or no lunch due to no fault of my own. I preferred to eat something rather than starve.
In case you are unaware, you weaken anything you want to say by purposely changing the spelling of words. It panders to those who are like minded, while pushing away those people on the fence you want to convince.
Four words into your second paragraph is where a lot of people will stop reading.
Something to keep in mind if you want to make an impact.
I am German. Auto correct changing "document" to "Dokument" (the German Word) happens easily on a phone set to German and honestly just didn't jump at me as wrong. After all it's how I am used to read the word.
But I am honestly curious. How does a misspelled word pander to those that are like minded? Does "Dokument" have any meaning in English that I as a not nativ speaker am not aware of?
Some people might assume that writing a word in a German style means you're comparing the subject matter to Nazis in some way, I guess? That's the best I've got
You do also know that in addition to German words being similar, other languages have similar words, right? And maybe they use the spelling they are familiar or maybe their auto correct choose the spelling in their native language. This comment is ridiculous and assumes that first off, everyone speaks English, and second, everyone speaks it perfectly.
Make em think their tax money is paying for "Ni--er food" and they'll burn down the entire education system.
Hell, replace Nword with F-word or Kword honestly doesn't matter.
Source: What happened to all the public swimming pools after Desegregation? And That one time a Republican signed a strict anti gun law the second the Black community exercised their Second.
Thank you, I was also confused by what the fuck the "K-word" could be. I think we could asterisk out a letter, so meaning is still conveyed, and the impact of the word might still be felt and understood.
I understand your reasoning but I can't subacribe it.
A word is a word. A word becomes an insult if it is used against someone, with that specific intent.
I specifically used the quotation marks because I wanted to convey the understanding that I was putting the words out with no connection to anything.
Writing on a social media outlet feels more and more like walking through a trap field. Cryptic acronyms, forbidden and self censored words and redacted sentences.
This is the worst kind of censorship I can think of. It blocks the person and others from fully expressing ideas and thoughts and preassigns a default judgement towards who is trying to convey an argument.
The best way to void a word - especially if an insult - is to ignore it. Don't use it, ignore it in others speech, attack the use of it as an insult.
Who cares about history? This is 2023. People in history would disagree with people today about slavery and marital rape too. Should we reconsider allowing those things?
Well… it’s okay if you don’t want the job. Because I wouldn’t let you near any kids I might have if you actually have to ask that in context of free meals for kids whose only meal comes at school.
It’s this precise lack of empathy that, in my eyes, disqualifies you from caring for other’s kids.
I mean, what kind of person says “we shouldn’t feed starving kids”? Like seriously. That’s what you’re arguing here.
You take care of your own? Congratulations. Want a participation trophy? I think I can spare a bottle cap or something. Too bad they’re no longer shiny…
Yes. Fuck over starving not-rich-kids whose only meal of the day comes from free school lunch programs- because a rich kid “might” get a free lunch.
* golf clap *
Impressive display of empathy there. Oh and by the way… you’re generally wrong about whose getting free lunches. So you’re fucking starving kids over … because of propaganda.
What's the old adage? It takes a village to raise a child?
As a father of a young child, there is no fucking way that one or two parents can meet all of the child's development needs. You need everything from Farmers to grow food, teachers to teach, doctors to medicine, grandparents to grandparent, and they need peers and other people to interact with. Every one of those people plays a role, some more important than others.
Ok, parents and grandparents granted, but I don't think farmers are raising children. I don't really want teachers raising my children I want them to teach my children.
I think the village to raise a child adage is very much in the dustbin. Once upon a time that would literally be the case and the food would also come from the farmers of the village so it would be quite a different dynamic.
I wish there was more of a community and we could jointly aid in the support of children certainly where I live that is not the case.
Ultimately it is the parent's job to raise the children, and it's the parents job to select who the child comes in contact with.
As a parent of a young child, you're completely delusional if you think parents are in complete control of every person that a child comes into contact with.
Just at my kids school there are probably 250 staff members including teachers and administrative staff who come into contact with the kids on a daily basis. I have zero influence on that!
This doesn't even touch on mass media in the internet which have a huge impact on not just children, but people like yourself. You yourself are interacting with people on the internet whom you know nothing about.
People who want others to suffer will support this. This will almost only impact low income (mostly minority) populations, the kind that republic voter love to hurt
Kids that grow up hungry are more likely to enter the workforce early, doing the low-wage "essential role" jobs that the capital class desperately needs bodies for. Breaking the cycle of poverty is a big no-no for the 1%.
Yeah it does. The cruelty is the point. They're trying to punish children and their parents for being (mostly non-White) poor.
At the same time, they're trying to turbocharge the school to prison pipeline so their owner donors from the prison industrial complex can profit off poverty and perpetuate more themselves, leading to an infinite loop of poverty, misery and demonization for anyone who's not already a rich cishet white man.
They don't see a difference between bad and poor. The only exception is the perfect poor republicans - but they're only temporarily poor, they're going to be rich one day so all this poor bashing isn't counter productive to them!
They don’t care if the parents are bad or not, but hey just want to hurt poor people and minorities, to lost republicans those words are the same thing.
The USA is a deeply racist settler colony founded on doing violence to those without the privilege to escape it. The idea that someone "undeserving" might get a benefit from one's tax payment enrages the Republican voting base which is mostly white men who make over $50k a year.
This chart bothers me because the y-axis is all over the place in terms of range. Sometimes it's $15k range, sometimes it's $30k, sometimes it's $50k. Really skews the data.
I'm a registered Democrat, but that doesn't stop me disagreeing with the Democratic party on plenty of issues. The vast majority of people don't adhere 100% to their party's politics, especially with the big-tent two-party system in the US. I can't speak for the person to whom you're responding, but you can't extrapolate from their disagreement on one issue to disagreement on others.
Yes, but this particular idea is intentionally letting children starve. Would you really want to associate yourself with a group that wanted to do that if you were against it?
It's like saying, "I'm on their side, but I don't agree with their 'kill the asylum seekers' policy." (I assume that will be a policy of theirs eventually.) How morally repugnant does a group have to get before you disassociate yourself with them?
It already is policy for some of them, see Abbott's death trap along the Rio Grande or DeSantis wanting to station his state guard on major crossings to shoot undocumented migrants.
Getting people to think about identifying based on party membership is important to get people to actually think about whether they should be a member of that party. Sure, they might be all in on racist wall building, insurrection, and blowing Trump.
But maybe a nudge can help them be a little introspective and think more broadly about whether they picked the right team if their team wants children to go hungry. Just trying to get them to think about things, not saying every party member needs to agree with everything about their party.
If you only identify yourself as being Republican because you consider yourself to be a conservative then I've got good news for you, no need to associate with the wackos, the US Democrats are the conservatives of the countries where there actually exists a political spectrum that extends further left than right of center 👍
By convincing them that their taxes shouldn't come back to them in any way and should instead be used for a higher purpose. Corporation, that's the higher purpose.
Because this is a social good that results in ROI over decades. If something is not immediately profitable, it is difficult for the private market to be leveraged to find an optimal solution. Situations like that are typically where government has to step in.
a grossly oversimplied suggestion i would have is 10% of the income, starting from a 10 million USD/month income, up 15 percentual points for each order of magnitude, so 25% if someone gets 100m/mo, 55% if 10b/mo, 70% if 100b/mo etc.
assuming all these people properly pays accurately, that would be about enough to feed people in and out of school.
I don't think your books will balance. There are not enough billionaires to find this. Also, they will all disappear, I bet they have good lawyers.
And I bet if implemented that threshold would come down and down and down. Let's talk to a prosperous Ukrainian farmer in the interwar period. Sent to a goo-lag for having a sewing machine perhaps?
i smell double bind. say nothing and the food is taken away, with parents being forced to spit up more money for food. say something and rich people will be sad, which means no money added to pay for food, which will be used to justify taking away the food anyway.
what's your solution then? you may not need the government to pay for your kids' food, but there are people who still needs it. you gotta feed people somehow and be careful not to fall into ableist policy (e.g only people who quote unquote, "works hard", gets the food).
You don't need the government's help. I happen to know a lot of families DO. There are kids right now, in the richest fucking country in the world, who might only have one substantial meal in their day, and that's their school lunch.
poor workers aren't being taxed. The US has a heavily progressive tax system. Anyone making less than 40-50k pays almost nothing in taxes as a percentage of income, as compared to someone making 300k a year.
These meals help the poor and middle class the most and are paid for mostly by high earners.
It's actively more efficient to just give free food to everyone, qualifying it just adds administrative overhead and gives space for already at-risk people to fall through the cracks because holy shit guess what, they don't tend to have the time or energy to spend on filling in 500 pages of paperwork to apply for welfare!
Yes, fucking give billionaires potatoes, i think society can survive that terrible terrible expense.
Hang on. Are you saying government bureaucracies are inefficient and wasteful. You need to be careful expressing opinions like that round here you'll get down voted.
Food should be a basic right. So, yes. I would argue that it should be the government's job.
In fact, I would argue that all the basic survival needs should just be provided to us free of charge. Leave money and income and working as such for earning yourself luxuries.
Anything less and you're just forcing people to work under the threat of starvation and homelessness. And is that right?
...also were talking about literal children here. It's not like they have a choice exactly.
I agree. We need a federal lawsuit to enforce this. The federal government has been completely ignoring homelessness and the complete lack of a social safety net throughout the US and it's just killing the country.
100% wrong. Anything that can run out can never be a "right". Freedom of speech can be, freedom from unjust search and seizure can be.
What happens when the money, or the food, or the houses run out?
I'm in the UK. It doesn't matter that we have an NHS (which I am a huge fan of btw), I have zero hope of being able to use it in anything like a timely manner because it's falling to bits. Not even healthcare can be a "right"
NHS is a government service you explicitly pay for (unless you are exempt from NI). It is not a right, it is something you purchase. You can be exempt from paying due to your personal circumstances, but if all is well - you pay.
The fact that our beloved government does not deliver what you pay for is another topic, but it certainly should.
Thin ice. I believe there must be a balance between free capitalism and a moderately strong government with a safety net. People do fail in life, that should not necessarily lead to death. Children in particular are hungry not because they failed, but because their parents did. And there is a role for the government to support the children in need. This was a role of a tribe in the early days, or community slightly later; then governments took over.
This safety net has to exist for other categories of people in need, the extent of this support is to be debated in a healthy society.
Personally I do see a merit even in the universal income. Not because this is everyone's birthright, but because it may soon become a necessity.
To feed children? Step back, take a look in the mirror, and ask yourself where you went wrong that you're talking about taking away food from children's mouths. You are a monster.
If you also think abortion should be illegal in addition to not feeding them, you aren't just a monster, you're an indescribably awful evil.
Who says I'm against free school meals. Just not distributing them in a wasteful way. Tell you what, we have the school meals, but it has one control, you have to apply. That's it, no means testing. That would reduce the number of meals severed to wealthy children straight away.
In the UK we have a similar thing with heating bills. Old people get a heating allowance if they need it or not. You can't chose to not have it. Let's put the same control on there
I can afford £2 a day, happily, but my youngest gets meals regardless. In fact, these meals were a huge problem for lots of schools that were not equipment to feed the first 3 years of school entrants.
Why don't you take a look in the mirror and ask how you can be happy garisnhig the wages of low I come workers to feed my children?
You do realize taxes are not the same amount taken from everyone? And if you're poor enough you don't pay anything on taxes. If you're a step above that, you get back everything you paid on taxes at the end of the year. I'm not really sure why you think tax funded lunches would garnish wages from the poor.
No, it's not a straw man at all. It's a logical thing to bring up when you are stating that children don't deserve to be fed by taxpayer money. The state forces chosen to exist and then makes it illegal for taxes to pay for their food thereby proving that they don't give a damn about the kids at all.
To put ovide an environment of personal safety and property rights so people can be independently prosperus. I have no issue with a welfare state, but that is not the primary function of government.
What happens when you run out of other peoples money?
It literally is, by the doctrine on parens patriae. It is the duty of the state to act in the best interests of its citizens who unable to pursue those interests themselves, whether it’s because they are incapacitated, or minors. This goes back centuries, to the time of monarchy. Our ancestors resolved the question of “who should care for the orphans?” with the simple answer, “it is the king’s duty.”
It is the government’s job, in its role as sovereign, to feed kids who don’t get enough to eat. And if it’s not, we should just burn it all to the fucking ground, because why else even have a society?
It's easier for everyone to have free meals than a select few, I feel. It would also get rid of an easy target on lower income kids being bullied for having the "free lunch".
Probably also much cheaper per. Trying to set up a meals program for the fee underprivileged - probably should just order Panera delivered. But if you go through the overhead of setting up a program, the cost of more meals is probably marginal.
Also, how about when kids forget. Why does it always seem to be the teacher who has to buy emergency food?
To me, it’s like prison: kids always compare school to prison, so let’s go with that. The government is forcing them to be there past meal times, and not letting them out. The school is claiming parental authority to watch out for their needs. One of them is food, dammit
Yes, the government is wasteful and bureaucratic I agree. Is my solution anyone can have the free meals if they apply for it they're simple to apply for through the school.
That would immediately eliminate a huge number of unnecessary lunches to purchase. I would happily have been buying my kids their school lunches through their first three years of school, but that was not a choice offered to me.
When I went to school half the kids are on preschool dinners literally nobody cared.
Incidentally my family were dirt poor when I was a little but we weren't poor enough to qualify for free school lunches but we may do with sandwiches. Presuming the poor are incapable and requiring of constant charity is the soft bigotry of low expectation
It's a major failure of a society when people don't have access to the basics. Basic food, water, shelter, and basic healthcare. America fails quite badly on this.
Wendy's is luxury food however. If you want it, go earn money and buy it yourself.
I'm pretty sure we're saying the opposite... We want to tax THE RICH. You know, the guys with billions and paying almost no taxes because of loopholes only they can use.
How about they pay their FUCKING FAIR SHARE so the rest of us aren't left picking up the damn tab every time.
Quit using bad faith strawman arguments you absolute monster.
You guys will make up ANY ridiculous straw man argument to screw yourself and everyone over won't you? You just are desperate to make everyone except the 1% stay suffering.
I swear everyone in this thread is having a hallucination that I'm somebody I'm not. I presume you think I'm sort of some of red that wearing uber conservative?
Do people's actual opinions matter at all.
Perhaps I should think you're a communist or something and then accuse you of it?
Again, do you understand what putting quotes around a word means? It doesn't sound like you do. And no feelings were hurt, that's a lie. I'm not sure why you're lying.
In the Declaration of the Independence it states thusly:
"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Since you cannot have Life without food, it would logically follow that it is the government's job to (secure these rights) food for people. If it does not, then the Declaration of Independence states that we can overthrow the government.
The Constitution doesn't say anything about who produces what. It just says that you have the right to those things, and that the states sole purpose is to ensure that.
Wow, the smooth brain takines of this sub would down vote me out of existence and "banish" me if they had the chance. Great advert for the society you would run.
None of you have any inquiry as to why I would say that.
The supreme Court in its June 24th ruling last year overturning Roe versus Wade argued that there weren't enough infants available for adoption:
"“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt
children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the do-
mestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent”);
Although "pro-lifers" don't care about providing even for fetuses. They're not investing in healthcare, they're shutting down everything they can that is associated with abortion, which is mainly the people who actually care and the field of medicine that deals with pregnancy.
For a lot of situations kids will do what you want them to do if you actually explain why you want them to do it. Furthermore, public schooling is not one of those things, because 13 years of it is clearly not best for some students.
If it were about minimum knowledge than you would be able to test out of it, and those not meeting minimum requirements wouldn't be able to graduate. But as it stands the top 10% of 8th graders know more than the bottom 30% of highschool graduates.
I got at GED. I also got a perfect score. Not because I'm some sort of genius, because there was not one single thing on it I hadn't learned by the end of middle school.
No. When you go under 16 you are talking about a child that is too young to make executive decisions in the outside world that would be expected of an someone with a GED. High school and GED are culturally signs of being ready for adulthood. Under 16 is too young.
Where do people learn critical thinking skills? I was taught about propaganda and rhetoric in public elementary school (though, sadly, schooling in such matters was only in the "gifted" program). Though to be fair, I learned about pyramid marketing and the attraction of woo from my mother, queen of the pyramids, and experienced the targeted devaluing of education from my youth group pastor who was trying (with limited success) to keep from losing college kids "to the world." The cognitive dissonance when I started college was extreme, to say the least.
In life, from family, from teachers(I'm not asking to defund public schools...), from the internet, self-taught, from books, etc. Many ways- clearly public schools aren't effective for all students, so why are they condemned to it?
But, um, the first national free lunch programs were started in this country because when WWII started, the government found that the post-Great-Depression populace was so stunted from malnourishment that there was concern about recruiting enough eligible soldiers. So, does this mean Republicans no longer want a military? No more sending poor people to fight their wars?
I'm an adult & food stamps have gotten me through many rough patches. studies show that investing in social services is better for the economy than letting people starve, who woulda thunk?
Yeah, these "pro-life" monsters absolutely would have children starve to get closer to another 0 at the end of their bank accounts. Vote well, and influence your local community as much as you can!
Yeah, because the Dem leadership and the candidates they pick in the primaries have been doing doing a great job containing and restraining the worst elements of the far right 🙄
If you just vote for the same invertebrate corporate stooges again, they'll be sure to do what they say THIS TIME!
We need a general strike and a viable and principled third party to the left of the Dem corporation.
While we're listing things the country needs and structurally never will have, we also need oral sex and free steak dinners! It's tough having to vote in the reality we live in, instead of the one we imagine
Labor unions and civil rights activists want to change the party from within. A third party to the left of the Democrats will do nothing but ensure Republican victories from hereon in. They are aware of this. I'm not sure why you aren't.
You're wrong on both points. While some progressives support them and some neoliberals pay them lip service while actively supporting and accepting support from cops and billionaires, many labor unions and civil rights movements (especially the ones with a lot of millennial and gen Z members) have no party affiliation because they've been fucked over by the Dem leadership for the last 30+ years.
The best way to make sure Republicans don't win isn't to keep rushing for the middle ground every time they move farther right, to the point of now being a center right to right wing party. It's staking out and defending a principled left wing position that's much more in line with the actual policy priorities of the majority of the.
I'm not happy with the Dems either, but I do believe they will fight against the elimination of free school lunches. I will vote for them even if this is all they did.
And lo, Jesus did taketh the loaf and the fish, and did so declare unto to the crowd that they could go forth and multiply, for the bread and the fish did belong only to himself.
News article title reading "Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority" followed by the first sentence of the article reading "As states across the country move to make sure students are well fed, Republicans have announced their intention to fight back."
Below the article screenshot is a picture of Henry J Waternoose III, the spider-like monster from Monsters Inc, saying "I'll starve a thousand children before I let this company get taxed"
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Can I get a source on this? Because I know the GOP is Batshit, but this is cartoonishly evil, and I feel like a republican voter will immediately assume it's fake.
"The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”
I mean, maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm not against schools providing free healthy lunches to every student regardless of whether their parent makes minimum wage or is in the 1%, so long as we start taxing accordingly. I feel like if we legally make children attend school and get an education (which we should, to be clear) then we should feed them while they are there. If children are fed and learn healthy eating habits in school, it theoretically would set them up much better as they grow older, no? I don't even have children and would be happy to see my tax dollars go to school lunches.
You're absolutely not wrong there. You have a heart and empathy. Children SHOULD NOT be punished for the financial situation their parents are in. A free school lunch may be the only real meal a child gets all day and that is horrible for their health and development.
We have the resources to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner to every child in the public school system, and I absolutely think we should be doing that. Cut subsidies to boondoggles, increase taxes for the top 20%, purchase food in bulk on government contracts that have been negotiated for lower costs, and give children what they deserve.
Providing a basic need like food for them is the very least a modern rich society can do.
It would make sense if the food was actually edible. Michelle essentially ruined the school lunch system by not regulating the shortcuts taken to reduce costs of the program. Had actual investment went into it, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's a waste of money as it is, and should be reformed to be better.
No it isn't, and apparently it's actually. Real headline. And when I went to read a little more about it, the republican study committee did release a 2024 budget proposal eliminating free lunches (among other things).
Even if it is satire, we’ve heard them attack school lunches before. A thing must be semi-plausible to trick people. They want to destroy public schools and this will be in their playbook at least locally in some districts.
It's weird how cartoonishly evil the GOP's policies are, and yet they never seem to have problems getting any votes. I'm pretty sure if the GOP wanted to legalize pedophilia or wanted to just outright destroy the Earth, their base of voters wouldn't even blink. At least with Democratic policies, they are debatable, like I could see how somebody might potentially disagree with their execution. "There's a problem, and here's how we want to try to solve it." With GOP policies though, I just can't imagine who gets behind this shit, or I can imagine, but I can't believe those are actually real people.
Some here asking who are or would still vote for them, well in their eyes, they don't want to feed YOUR kid(s), they believe their kids are well fed. Only when when they are in need will they have empathy.
Bullshit. Eliminating corporate taxes just lets the conglomerates off the hook while doing nothing to make them stop their price hikes. They'll always find another pretense to squeeze as much profit out of the people as possible.
What would ACTUALLY work is direct price ceilings, increasing the federal minimum wage to at least $20/h and closing every loophole so that what anti-profiteering and antitrust laws are ALREADY in the books actually get enforced.
If you mean UBI coupled with strict price controls then HELL YEAH!
If you mean without, though, they will just raise prices enough to render it absolutely meaningless other than as a talking point for dishonest demagogues like Andrew Yang.
The poor poor corporations. Won't someone think of them
Funny how when taxes for corporations go down, prices go up, taxes for corporations go up, prices go up, billions of dollars of loans are given away for free to corporations and forgiven prices still go up, and record profits are recorded across the board by corporations prices go up.
I don't think it's the taxes on corporations making prices go up.
Well that's a stupid ass way to go about it, I'd rather tax everyone based upon their wealth to feed all the children. The poorest would even be exempt, as they cannot bear the tax burden, while the wealthy would pay more, as they can.
Ok, great, we are totally rebuilding the tax code. Let's do it. Let's set a threshold of ..... 100k before income tax kicks in. Even then, your money would be better spent targeting it.
Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Parker Dam, Painted Rock Dam, Mormon Flat Dam? Quite a lot of dams in the desert, as it turns out.
It also turns out that the administrative overhead of means-testing government aid often costs more than just providing the aid to everyone. Food is relatively cheap compared to staff, so I’m going to guess that it’s cheaper just to feed the rich kids, if they want it, rather than expend a lot of money and effort to ensure that they don’t get any. This has the side benefit of removing an often-arduous and humiliating application process for poor families, and the stigma of “poor” that humiliates children in the lunchroom.
And, holy hell, we’re talking about feeding children, I don’t know why this is so hateful to so many people.
Touche. Ok, middle of the driest part of the Sahara.
Hang on. Are you saying live government bureaucracies are inefficient and wasteful?
This whole poor people being humiliated by receiving aid discourse it's toxic as hell. Is a supermarket in the UK that recently started selling their cheapest stuff with a yellow brand, people said this about that if we're going to humiliate the poor people buying it. The only people who think that are people who are not themselves poor.
Especially when the answer is to just turn on the money gun fire it randomly around I find that offensive.
Also it's interesting how people can be too poor to have to apply for a benefit or to have that benefit means tested yet they can't be too poor to not be proud about receiving that benefit.
You know, I tough it might be good to fact-check this screenshot. It might be missrepresenting something. So I did a little digging and it turns out that this is based on a document provided by the Republican Study Committee (about three quateres of house rebuplicans are members).
I read the
Dokumentdocument (you can find it here) and HOLY HELL THIS IS THE WORST THING I HAVE READ IN A LONG WHILE.It's so full of lies, half-truths and so, so, so much finger pointing to the "woke socialist Biden Administration" (yes, that is a quote), so removed from reality... It was painfull to read. There is so much utter nonsense in that one document.
Anyhow. The headline is dead on. And it's far far from the worst thing that they are proposing.
I need to bang my head against a wall now untill i have erased the memory of reading this bullshit.
It's all about elimination of all federal regulations:
Fucking dinosaurs don't realize that they haven't even printed a yellow pages in around a decade. Last time I received one it was like 30 pages long for a major city.
Talk about pandering to their elderly base. Most Gen Z probably don't even know what a "yellow pages" is.
the republican party head quarters are on yellowpages.com - i think they should lead by example
what?
I'm agreeing with you - they must be drunk.
That is the dumbest idea I've heard today
Of course, they're all for federal regulations when it comes to limiting transgender people getting medical care.
that's the phone book right? or is it different
Yes, specifically the business phone book. The residential one was the "white pages" -a weird book that was mysteriously left on your porch every few years where everyone's home phone (those strange bulky ones that were attached to the wall) and home address was listed. That's what people mean in old movies when they say "I'm in the book!" It means "You know my name, you can find my phone number if you want to call me."
white pages would be straight up dangerous in the Internet age
You could get your number "unlisted" for an additional fee. It was still dangerous in the pre-internet age, just not to the extent that it is today.
I think we got one every year actually at my old rental house. We would get a white and yellow pages. Strangely, yellow pages would shrink every year until around 2012 it was about 30 pages long.
You had to pay to be in the yellow pages, so as googling stuff became the main way to find anything, businesses that weren't mainly patronized by old people started opting out.
The yellow pages test comes from a dead libertarian Austrian "Economist". Kinda interesting since he died in 1995 and the school of economics he followed was already obsolete when it came out in the 1930s.
This stuff is part of the reason why age does matter in elected office. People get ideas and they don't let them go even long after they have been disproven.
Play them at their own game by listing a child starving service in the Yellow Pages.
BRB, going to start my own CIA and undercut the original by outsourcing the majority of the work to Bangalore for cheap labour.
Because of the similarities between Republicans and the UK Conservative party, I am 100% convinced this is a collaborated narrative. They have collectively decided on which levers to pull and push because of data they have at hand. Some people have no moral compass at all when it comes to making money. And let's face it, this is purely about backhanders and donation funding.
Rupert Murdoch owns The Sun in the UK, and Fox News in the US. That's probably your common denominator.
https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/about/ is the main link imo. Phil Moorhouse said in one of his videos that this is heavily funded by the Republican party. I cannot find that video though. I also cannot find a link with these and Murdoch. It very much looks like the UK Tories are copying the Republicans. The way they have abused the UK is no where near as bad as the stunts of the Republicans over there.
Brexit is by far one of the worst political stunts inflicted upon the UK I could possibly imagine. Losing the right to live and work in an entire continent worth of cultures and economies -- sure, here in the US has a problem with guns, women as equals, "God and Country" white nationalism in every mega church across the nation, and American Exceptionalism, etc., but Brexit is a whole other level of stupidity.
Yeah, Britain had a lot of exceptions as founder country and they decided to loose them.
It's impossible to overestimate the evil of the Republican party.
Go play some tetris. Supposedly helps.
But that is exactly what they are counting on. We need more angry informed people instead of the angry idiots that lap this up because "woke is bad" but can't explain what woke is. Woke = anything you disagree with.
Hmm. They want to protect social security for seniors.... Isn't that just like socialism but with extra steps?
I understand discouraging it, as the free school lunches were shit and are shit that is barely edible, but banning it seems wrong. There are some places where there are kids who will eat the disgusting whatever it is they pulled from the dumpster behind the school, but I don't think most people would want to. But also from the quotes you provided, I doubt it's about that...
I was one of the kids that received free lunch at school growing up. No, it wasn’t my favorite food but it was a meal that I would not have had otherwise. It was free lunch or no lunch due to no fault of my own. I preferred to eat something rather than starve.
The solution is to this issue is more money from school free lunch. Starve the beast is a well known political tactic.
I thought that something like 40% of kids are in low income families who can't afford lunch. Is that still the case?
In case you are unaware, you weaken anything you want to say by purposely changing the spelling of words. It panders to those who are like minded, while pushing away those people on the fence you want to convince.
Four words into your second paragraph is where a lot of people will stop reading.
Something to keep in mind if you want to make an impact.
I am German. Auto correct changing "document" to "Dokument" (the German Word) happens easily on a phone set to German and honestly just didn't jump at me as wrong. After all it's how I am used to read the word.
But I am honestly curious. How does a misspelled word pander to those that are like minded? Does "Dokument" have any meaning in English that I as a not nativ speaker am not aware of?
Some people might assume that writing a word in a German style means you're comparing the subject matter to Nazis in some way, I guess? That's the best I've got
Yea that's what I thought at first
In case you are unaware, no. Lol
You do also know that in addition to German words being similar, other languages have similar words, right? And maybe they use the spelling they are familiar or maybe their auto correct choose the spelling in their native language. This comment is ridiculous and assumes that first off, everyone speaks English, and second, everyone speaks it perfectly.
How the hell do they want to convince people this is a good thing?
Make em think their tax money is paying for "Ni--er food" and they'll burn down the entire education system.
Hell, replace Nword with F-word or Kword honestly doesn't matter.
Source: What happened to all the public swimming pools after Desegregation? And That one time a Republican signed a strict anti gun law the second the Black community exercised their Second.
This town had a lovely swimming pool which was suddenly closed and filled in during the 1960s. I can't imagine why.
What is the Fword or the Kword?
Gays and jews, I assume.
Holy shit. I couldn't figure out the K word, despite the fact that I literally wrote a joke that requires it.
...k word?
I believe they referring to "kike", a slur for jewish people.
With the degree of self censoring and the love acronyms and shortening words, it's becoming a challenge to follow written text.
Is the fword "removed"?
the fword is "floating point", there are a lot of leftist programmers.
I’m a lefty programmer and I do indeed hate floating points. I’ve had it bite me far too many times.
What is the connection between those two?
It's a slur used for leftist programmers.
the connection between "floating point" and programming? gee no clue
Thank you, I was also confused by what the fuck the "K-word" could be. I think we could asterisk out a letter, so meaning is still conveyed, and the impact of the word might still be felt and understood.
I understand your reasoning but I can't subacribe it.
A word is a word. A word becomes an insult if it is used against someone, with that specific intent.
I specifically used the quotation marks because I wanted to convey the understanding that I was putting the words out with no connection to anything.
Writing on a social media outlet feels more and more like walking through a trap field. Cryptic acronyms, forbidden and self censored words and redacted sentences.
This is the worst kind of censorship I can think of. It blocks the person and others from fully expressing ideas and thoughts and preassigns a default judgement towards who is trying to convey an argument.
The best way to void a word - especially if an insult - is to ignore it. Don't use it, ignore it in others speech, attack the use of it as an insult.
Self censoring is not a good thing.
Honestly I wanted to be edgy but been trained that I'll get auto moderated if I just type it out.
Also people really do be thinking you are racist if you type out a word (or recite a song lyric) from a different point of view.
In other words, it's a no win scenario.
It is
“Free meals is communist!!”
Which… If you think like they do, then socialism==communism==unamerican.
Public schools are already under that banner. This shouldn't even be a question.
And they want to do away with public schools...I'd say that tracks for them.
conservative americans LOVE making communism sound idyllic
Who's job is it to care for children?
Everyone's. Because they're children.
Including the bourgeoisie?
Children aren't bourgeoisie, they're children.
I think can find you people from history who man disagree
Who cares about history? This is 2023. People in history would disagree with people today about slavery and marital rape too. Should we reconsider allowing those things?
Well… it’s okay if you don’t want the job. Because I wouldn’t let you near any kids I might have if you actually have to ask that in context of free meals for kids whose only meal comes at school.
I care for my children. Who do you think should be doing it?
It’s this precise lack of empathy that, in my eyes, disqualifies you from caring for other’s kids.
I mean, what kind of person says “we shouldn’t feed starving kids”? Like seriously. That’s what you’re arguing here.
You take care of your own? Congratulations. Want a participation trophy? I think I can spare a bottle cap or something. Too bad they’re no longer shiny…
I am fine with "feeding starving children". It's feeding the children of wealthy people that I bridle at
What makes you think I want praise for raising my kids? It's my job. That's my point
Yes. Fuck over starving not-rich-kids whose only meal of the day comes from free school lunch programs- because a rich kid “might” get a free lunch.
* golf clap * Impressive display of empathy there. Oh and by the way… you’re generally wrong about whose getting free lunches. So you’re fucking starving kids over … because of propaganda.
People. Society really.
What's the old adage? It takes a village to raise a child?
As a father of a young child, there is no fucking way that one or two parents can meet all of the child's development needs. You need everything from Farmers to grow food, teachers to teach, doctors to medicine, grandparents to grandparent, and they need peers and other people to interact with. Every one of those people plays a role, some more important than others.
Ok, parents and grandparents granted, but I don't think farmers are raising children. I don't really want teachers raising my children I want them to teach my children.
I think the village to raise a child adage is very much in the dustbin. Once upon a time that would literally be the case and the food would also come from the farmers of the village so it would be quite a different dynamic.
I wish there was more of a community and we could jointly aid in the support of children certainly where I live that is not the case.
Ultimately it is the parent's job to raise the children, and it's the parents job to select who the child comes in contact with.
As a parent of a young child, you're completely delusional if you think parents are in complete control of every person that a child comes into contact with.
Just at my kids school there are probably 250 staff members including teachers and administrative staff who come into contact with the kids on a daily basis. I have zero influence on that!
This doesn't even touch on mass media in the internet which have a huge impact on not just children, but people like yourself. You yourself are interacting with people on the internet whom you know nothing about.
And if the parents are unable to raise the children properly, then the children should just starve?
People who want others to suffer will support this. This will almost only impact low income (mostly minority) populations, the kind that republic voter love to hurt
You can't punish bad parents by punishing their children. Even if their viewpoint was right this would make no sense.
Except, Republicans love to punish the children of poor parents for the crime of being poor.
You don't have to be a bad parent to be poor, you just have to be poor.
The assumption I mentioned was that in their worldview being poor is also being bad parents. Regardless, punishing children accomplishes nothing.
Kids that grow up hungry are more likely to enter the workforce early, doing the low-wage "essential role" jobs that the capital class desperately needs bodies for. Breaking the cycle of poverty is a big no-no for the 1%.
It hurts people. That's the goal.
Yeah it does. The cruelty is the point. They're trying to punish children and their parents for being (mostly non-White) poor.
At the same time, they're trying to turbocharge the school to prison pipeline so their owner donors from the prison industrial complex can profit off poverty and perpetuate more themselves, leading to an infinite loop of poverty, misery and demonization for anyone who's not already a rich cishet white man.
You're trying to use logic against the illogical.
Like throwing paper at a brick wall trying to knock it down
These are the same people who think you can beat the gay out of a child. They think being cruel helps people.
They don't see a difference between bad and poor. The only exception is the perfect poor republicans - but they're only temporarily poor, they're going to be rich one day so all this poor bashing isn't counter productive to them!
They don’t care if the parents are bad or not, but hey just want to hurt poor people and minorities, to lost republicans those words are the same thing.
They just want people they dislike to suffer.
Going usual playbook, they'd prolly declare it "woke" and mumble the boilerplate shit about taxes, bootstraps, and communism.
The USA is a deeply racist settler colony founded on doing violence to those without the privilege to escape it. The idea that someone "undeserving" might get a benefit from one's tax payment enrages the Republican voting base which is mostly white men who make over $50k a year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/
About 60% of American households cross that threshold. It kinda comes off like you're saying people who make that much are overprivileged.
I suspect his information is out of date, $50k isn't a lot of money but 10 or 20 years ago it was.
Was it? I made that out of college almost 20 years ago. It wasn't what I would call rich
Yes, it was. If it helps, $50K then would be $81K today. The average minimum wage these days across the US is $8.5 an hour, or $17K per year.
So it is... it absolutely is. Even today it is quite a lot to many people.
This chart bothers me because the y-axis is all over the place in terms of range. Sometimes it's $15k range, sometimes it's $30k, sometimes it's $50k. Really skews the data.
Instead of defining yourself by party membership in a group that doesn't represent you, maybe you should think about not being a member of that party?
I'm a registered Democrat, but that doesn't stop me disagreeing with the Democratic party on plenty of issues. The vast majority of people don't adhere 100% to their party's politics, especially with the big-tent two-party system in the US. I can't speak for the person to whom you're responding, but you can't extrapolate from their disagreement on one issue to disagreement on others.
Yes, but this particular idea is intentionally letting children starve. Would you really want to associate yourself with a group that wanted to do that if you were against it?
It's like saying, "I'm on their side, but I don't agree with their 'kill the asylum seekers' policy." (I assume that will be a policy of theirs eventually.) How morally repugnant does a group have to get before you disassociate yourself with them?
It already is policy for some of them, see Abbott's death trap along the Rio Grande or DeSantis wanting to station his state guard on major crossings to shoot undocumented migrants.
I was thinking more hunt them down across America, but you're not wrong.
Getting people to think about identifying based on party membership is important to get people to actually think about whether they should be a member of that party. Sure, they might be all in on racist wall building, insurrection, and blowing Trump.
But maybe a nudge can help them be a little introspective and think more broadly about whether they picked the right team if their team wants children to go hungry. Just trying to get them to think about things, not saying every party member needs to agree with everything about their party.
If you only identify yourself as being Republican because you consider yourself to be a conservative then I've got good news for you, no need to associate with the wackos, the US Democrats are the conservatives of the countries where there actually exists a political spectrum that extends further left than right of center 👍
Based, lobby your representatives and let's try and get the basics down in a bipartisanly
Doesn't sound like you fit in with the Republicans at all
By convincing them that their taxes shouldn't come back to them in any way and should instead be used for a higher purpose. Corporation, that's the higher purpose.
It... helps the people they hate.
I don't need the government to feed my kids. But at the moment they are taxing poor workers to do so. Is that a good idea?
So maybe tax the rich? As long as there is a single person who can't afford to feed their kids, the government should feed them.
Ok, done. But don't feed the rich too. Deal?
Yes, this helps poor workers because their kids get free meals. This isn't raising taxes on the poor.
Where does the money come from?
Everyone. Literally everyone. When you're poor, you get the money back on your taxes.
How about we dont take the money in the first place
Because this is a social good that results in ROI over decades. If something is not immediately profitable, it is difficult for the private market to be leveraged to find an optimal solution. Situations like that are typically where government has to step in.
the solution isn't to stop feeding them altogether, but to tax those who actually wouldn't miss any of the money used for that.
see also: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
How rich do I have to be before I am one of the taxes?
a grossly oversimplied suggestion i would have is 10% of the income, starting from a 10 million USD/month income, up 15 percentual points for each order of magnitude, so 25% if someone gets 100m/mo, 55% if 10b/mo, 70% if 100b/mo etc.
assuming all these people properly pays accurately, that would be about enough to feed people in and out of school.
I don't think your books will balance. There are not enough billionaires to find this. Also, they will all disappear, I bet they have good lawyers.
And I bet if implemented that threshold would come down and down and down. Let's talk to a prosperous Ukrainian farmer in the interwar period. Sent to a goo-lag for having a sewing machine perhaps?
i smell double bind. say nothing and the food is taken away, with parents being forced to spit up more money for food. say something and rich people will be sad, which means no money added to pay for food, which will be used to justify taking away the food anyway.
what's your solution then? you may not need the government to pay for your kids' food, but there are people who still needs it. you gotta feed people somehow and be careful not to fall into ableist policy (e.g only people who quote unquote, "works hard", gets the food).
You don't need the government's help. I happen to know a lot of families DO. There are kids right now, in the richest fucking country in the world, who might only have one substantial meal in their day, and that's their school lunch.
Great. Give the free food to them
poor workers aren't being taxed. The US has a heavily progressive tax system. Anyone making less than 40-50k pays almost nothing in taxes as a percentage of income, as compared to someone making 300k a year.
These meals help the poor and middle class the most and are paid for mostly by high earners.
Ban abortions, then starve the children. If wasn't already apparent that the Republican Party is evil, this should make things much clearer.
Is it the government's job to feed us? Who do i call to order my free Wendy's
Starving children don't learn. An educated populace is good for the economy. Feeding children benefits you directly in the long-term.
But people like you never think about things past the short-term.
Fix the broken arse country so people can afford food. But until then, don't feed the rich kids. Your money will go further
And down voting not giving rich kids free food. Amazing
Yes, you ghoul, you do have a moral responsibility to help feed starving children in your community. Morality is wild, eh?
Totally possible. I dont need to feed rich peoples children
That's arguably the single most fundamental job of the government, yes.
The fucking romans had this figured out god damn.
I am curious, what did the romans do?
Give free food to poor people, it was literally an easy way to win votes to simply promise more food to the poor.
The aqueduct?
Brought peace?
Bread and Circuses
I disagree. You will always run out of other people's money
did someone forget to change to a puppet account? nice one
What, what are you talking about. This is my only account
I disagree 100%. It's the governments job to provide a safe environment to be individually free to be successful.
And "bread and circuses" what's a reference to a distracted demos
you.. do realize you're just straight up saying that people should die, right? like there are people who need free food to not starve to death.
Nope. Just feed the poor ones.
Do you like giving your taxes to feed the rich?
It's actively more efficient to just give free food to everyone, qualifying it just adds administrative overhead and gives space for already at-risk people to fall through the cracks because holy shit guess what, they don't tend to have the time or energy to spend on filling in 500 pages of paperwork to apply for welfare!
Yes, fucking give billionaires potatoes, i think society can survive that terrible terrible expense.
Hang on. Are you saying government bureaucracies are inefficient and wasteful. You need to be careful expressing opinions like that round here you'll get down voted.
You can't have a safe environment if people are starving.
I don't get your point
starving people tend to do whatever it takes to not starve to death, because you know they don't want to die
Ooookaaaayyyyy
Food should be a basic right. So, yes. I would argue that it should be the government's job.
In fact, I would argue that all the basic survival needs should just be provided to us free of charge. Leave money and income and working as such for earning yourself luxuries.
Anything less and you're just forcing people to work under the threat of starvation and homelessness. And is that right?
...also were talking about literal children here. It's not like they have a choice exactly.
I would LOVE if we could get to that system.
Everything paid for, you can sit at home all day if you want, but that will be with no luxuries.
You want Netflix and games and hobbies and whatever? Get a job to earn luxury income.
And it wouldn't even be hard to do. We would simply have to not have fucking BILLIONAIRES. That's about it.
I agree. We need a federal lawsuit to enforce this. The federal government has been completely ignoring homelessness and the complete lack of a social safety net throughout the US and it's just killing the country.
100% wrong. Anything that can run out can never be a "right". Freedom of speech can be, freedom from unjust search and seizure can be.
What happens when the money, or the food, or the houses run out?
I'm in the UK. It doesn't matter that we have an NHS (which I am a huge fan of btw), I have zero hope of being able to use it in anything like a timely manner because it's falling to bits. Not even healthcare can be a "right"
NHS is a government service you explicitly pay for (unless you are exempt from NI). It is not a right, it is something you purchase. You can be exempt from paying due to your personal circumstances, but if all is well - you pay. The fact that our beloved government does not deliver what you pay for is another topic, but it certainly should.
I agree. Do you think it should be a right?
Thin ice. I believe there must be a balance between free capitalism and a moderately strong government with a safety net. People do fail in life, that should not necessarily lead to death. Children in particular are hungry not because they failed, but because their parents did. And there is a role for the government to support the children in need. This was a role of a tribe in the early days, or community slightly later; then governments took over. This safety net has to exist for other categories of people in need, the extent of this support is to be debated in a healthy society. Personally I do see a merit even in the universal income. Not because this is everyone's birthright, but because it may soon become a necessity.
Yes, fuck you
To feed children? Step back, take a look in the mirror, and ask yourself where you went wrong that you're talking about taking away food from children's mouths. You are a monster.
If you also think abortion should be illegal in addition to not feeding them, you aren't just a monster, you're an indescribably awful evil.
Who says I'm against free school meals. Just not distributing them in a wasteful way. Tell you what, we have the school meals, but it has one control, you have to apply. That's it, no means testing. That would reduce the number of meals severed to wealthy children straight away.
In the UK we have a similar thing with heating bills. Old people get a heating allowance if they need it or not. You can't chose to not have it. Let's put the same control on there
I can afford £2 a day, happily, but my youngest gets meals regardless. In fact, these meals were a huge problem for lots of schools that were not equipment to feed the first 3 years of school entrants.
Why don't you take a look in the mirror and ask how you can be happy garisnhig the wages of low I come workers to feed my children?
You do realize taxes are not the same amount taken from everyone? And if you're poor enough you don't pay anything on taxes. If you're a step above that, you get back everything you paid on taxes at the end of the year. I'm not really sure why you think tax funded lunches would garnish wages from the poor.
I love how everyone stars with "you do realize". Nobody here is interested in conversation.
Yes, I do know that. Is there a cost of living crisis? Do you think higher tax payers are also finding it had to make ends meet?
Should we change the threshold, perhaps, where does that lost revenue come from? We would need to sort that out.
Also, nice strawman about abortion, you have zero idea about my opinions
No, it's not a straw man at all. It's a logical thing to bring up when you are stating that children don't deserve to be fed by taxpayer money. The state forces chosen to exist and then makes it illegal for taxes to pay for their food thereby proving that they don't give a damn about the kids at all.
I don't say that, the needy should be helped, not those who are not needy.
Are government rape gangs forcing women to get pregnant. Jesus, you should vote against that.
You have no idea on my opinions on abortion, a guarantee
What is the governments job if it‘s not „preventing children from staeving“?
To put ovide an environment of personal safety and property rights so people can be independently prosperus. I have no issue with a welfare state, but that is not the primary function of government.
What happens when you run out of other peoples money?
Other people's money. You mean taxes? What are our taxes supposed to do if not help people?
Lots of things. Roads. Police, healthcare, army, find ten civil service required to make it all work.
And also a welfare state
It literally is, by the doctrine on parens patriae. It is the duty of the state to act in the best interests of its citizens who unable to pursue those interests themselves, whether it’s because they are incapacitated, or minors. This goes back centuries, to the time of monarchy. Our ancestors resolved the question of “who should care for the orphans?” with the simple answer, “it is the king’s duty.”
It is the government’s job, in its role as sovereign, to feed kids who don’t get enough to eat. And if it’s not, we should just burn it all to the fucking ground, because why else even have a society?
What makes you think I don't agree with that?
Nothing! That's why I framed my reply as a factual statement, rather than a personal attack.
Wow. The first person on this thread to not just insult me.
I have no issue with free school meals, I just don't want them to be universal, feeding rich kids is crazy.
It's easier for everyone to have free meals than a select few, I feel. It would also get rid of an easy target on lower income kids being bullied for having the "free lunch".
Probably also much cheaper per. Trying to set up a meals program for the fee underprivileged - probably should just order Panera delivered. But if you go through the overhead of setting up a program, the cost of more meals is probably marginal.
Also, how about when kids forget. Why does it always seem to be the teacher who has to buy emergency food?
To me, it’s like prison: kids always compare school to prison, so let’s go with that. The government is forcing them to be there past meal times, and not letting them out. The school is claiming parental authority to watch out for their needs. One of them is food, dammit
In case you didn see my reply to the guy below 👇 it addresses some of your points too
Yes, the government is wasteful and bureaucratic I agree. Is my solution anyone can have the free meals if they apply for it they're simple to apply for through the school.
That would immediately eliminate a huge number of unnecessary lunches to purchase. I would happily have been buying my kids their school lunches through their first three years of school, but that was not a choice offered to me.
When I went to school half the kids are on preschool dinners literally nobody cared.
Incidentally my family were dirt poor when I was a little but we weren't poor enough to qualify for free school lunches but we may do with sandwiches. Presuming the poor are incapable and requiring of constant charity is the soft bigotry of low expectation
It's a major failure of a society when people don't have access to the basics. Basic food, water, shelter, and basic healthcare. America fails quite badly on this.
Wendy's is luxury food however. If you want it, go earn money and buy it yourself.
100% agree. Things are totally broken and the way the USA is being run is a shit show.
There are no saviours from either party.
The end of empire is basically here.
Oh, so you get to decide who is entitled to nice food. 🤔
You forgot to log into your other account again didn't you x3
Please explain. I don't understand what point you are getting at. Am I contradicting myself
You're arguing against feeding fucking children...
Did you ever stop to think, "are we the baddies?"
Unbelievable.
You want to tax the poor to feed rich peoples children, you absolute monster
I'm pretty sure we're saying the opposite... We want to tax THE RICH. You know, the guys with billions and paying almost no taxes because of loopholes only they can use.
How about they pay their FUCKING FAIR SHARE so the rest of us aren't left picking up the damn tab every time.
Quit using bad faith strawman arguments you absolute monster.
What? Bad faith straw men?
I'm expressing my exact point
Wendy’s
Dyslexic here. Thanks
Two downvotes for being neurodiverse. Best place is actually worse than Reddit
You guys will make up ANY ridiculous straw man argument to screw yourself and everyone over won't you? You just are desperate to make everyone except the 1% stay suffering.
"you guys"?
I swear everyone in this thread is having a hallucination that I'm somebody I'm not. I presume you think I'm sort of some of red that wearing uber conservative?
Do people's actual opinions matter at all.
Perhaps I should think you're a communist or something and then accuse you of it?
You're right. Let's send the children back to the mines, otherwise they dont deserve to eat.
Case in point
Come on now.
Bread and Circuses.
You're an evil ghoul. Evil ghouls get banished, not fed.
You have no idea about me but are happy to say I should be banished? Out of interest, how do you feel about Stalin?
Stalin burns in the depths of hell for betraying his people and his own revolution, not just for being a homicidal maniac.
Ghouls like you can join him.
He called me a tankie earlier. He's not all there.
Sorry for the hurt feelings there.
You did call being bourgeois a "crime"
Again, do you understand what putting quotes around a word means? It doesn't sound like you do. And no feelings were hurt, that's a lie. I'm not sure why you're lying.
Fucking hell. That's a bit harsh
I don't take kindly to starving kids, especially in the richest country to ever exist.
It basically is in a fairly straightforward way.
In the Declaration of the Independence it states thusly:
Since you cannot have Life without food, it would logically follow that it is the government's job to (secure these rights) food for people. If it does not, then the Declaration of Independence states that we can overthrow the government.
Really no. Are you squinting at the penumbra's? You have the freedom to pursue the production and ownership of food.
Children
The Constitution doesn't say anything about who produces what. It just says that you have the right to those things, and that the states sole purpose is to ensure that.
Wow, the smooth brain takines of this sub would down vote me out of existence and "banish" me if they had the chance. Great advert for the society you would run.
None of you have any inquiry as to why I would say that.
“No abortions! Those kids need to be born to starve!”
The late great George Carlin has a bit on advocating for the unborn I can't be fucked to find atm.
If you're pre-born you're fine, if you're preschool you're fucked!
The supreme Court in its June 24th ruling last year overturning Roe versus Wade argued that there weren't enough infants available for adoption:
"“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the do- mestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent”);
(Pg. 35)
I saw that, and I COULDNT BELIEVE they put it to print. Babies as a commodity for white Christian women.
Note to myself if I ever get reincarnated: I'm staying in that womb no matter what 😎
Although "pro-lifers" don't care about providing even for fetuses. They're not investing in healthcare, they're shutting down everything they can that is associated with abortion, which is mainly the people who actually care and the field of medicine that deals with pregnancy.
Also applies to the churches!
Most important quote from it:
"But as soon as you're born, you're on your own"
Sarah, don't you have a state to "govern"?
A lot of students don't want to go to school but have no choice, both because of societal and legal pressures.
A lot of kids also don't want to brush their teeth, go to bed at reasonable hours, or clean their rooms.
Kids don't really get to just do whatever they want it turns out because they aren't the best at taking care of themselves and making good decisions.
For a lot of situations kids will do what you want them to do if you actually explain why you want them to do it. Furthermore, public schooling is not one of those things, because 13 years of it is clearly not best for some students.
Yes, this is good. In order for society to run and all people to vote and participate in our country, we need a minimum education.
If it were about minimum knowledge than you would be able to test out of it, and those not meeting minimum requirements wouldn't be able to graduate. But as it stands the top 10% of 8th graders know more than the bottom 30% of highschool graduates.
You can test out of it and get a G.E.D. Many people do.
I got at GED. I also got a perfect score. Not because I'm some sort of genius, because there was not one single thing on it I hadn't learned by the end of middle school.
What age did you get it at?
In my state and in many states you had to be at least 18 to be out of education. In many others its 16. Do you know of any examples lower than that?
No. When you go under 16 you are talking about a child that is too young to make executive decisions in the outside world that would be expected of an someone with a GED. High school and GED are culturally signs of being ready for adulthood. Under 16 is too young.
No, being 18 is the sign of that. There are 40 year olds without highschool degrees or GEDs, they're still adults.
At the end of the day, it shouldn't be about knowledge anyway, it should be about the ability to think and exercise sound judgment.
Agreed, but I'm not convinced school teaches someone that anymore than daily life does.
Where do people learn critical thinking skills? I was taught about propaganda and rhetoric in public elementary school (though, sadly, schooling in such matters was only in the "gifted" program). Though to be fair, I learned about pyramid marketing and the attraction of woo from my mother, queen of the pyramids, and experienced the targeted devaluing of education from my youth group pastor who was trying (with limited success) to keep from losing college kids "to the world." The cognitive dissonance when I started college was extreme, to say the least.
In life, from family, from teachers(I'm not asking to defund public schools...), from the internet, self-taught, from books, etc. Many ways- clearly public schools aren't effective for all students, so why are they condemned to it?
But, um, the first national free lunch programs were started in this country because when WWII started, the government found that the post-Great-Depression populace was so stunted from malnourishment that there was concern about recruiting enough eligible soldiers. So, does this mean Republicans no longer want a military? No more sending poor people to fight their wars?
I'm an adult & food stamps have gotten me through many rough patches. studies show that investing in social services is better for the economy than letting people starve, who woulda thunk?
Yeah, these "pro-life" monsters absolutely would have children starve to get closer to another 0 at the end of their bank accounts. Vote well, and influence your local community as much as you can!
Yeah, because the Dem leadership and the candidates they pick in the primaries have been doing doing a great job containing and restraining the worst elements of the far right 🙄
If you just vote for the same invertebrate corporate stooges again, they'll be sure to do what they say THIS TIME!
We need a general strike and a viable and principled third party to the left of the Dem corporation.
While we're listing things the country needs and structurally never will have, we also need oral sex and free steak dinners! It's tough having to vote in the reality we live in, instead of the one we imagine
Even tougher when you stubbornly insist that it's impossible to change it to more resemble the better one that we "imagine".
If you always act on the presumption that you can't do anything, you'll be proven as weak and ineffectual as you think you are.
You should think more like labor unions and civil rights activists and less like Nancy Pelosi or her protégé, the somehow even worse Hakeem Jeffries.
Labor unions and civil rights activists want to change the party from within. A third party to the left of the Democrats will do nothing but ensure Republican victories from hereon in. They are aware of this. I'm not sure why you aren't.
You're wrong on both points. While some progressives support them and some neoliberals pay them lip service while actively supporting and accepting support from cops and billionaires, many labor unions and civil rights movements (especially the ones with a lot of millennial and gen Z members) have no party affiliation because they've been fucked over by the Dem leadership for the last 30+ years.
The best way to make sure Republicans don't win isn't to keep rushing for the middle ground every time they move farther right, to the point of now being a center right to right wing party. It's staking out and defending a principled left wing position that's much more in line with the actual policy priorities of the majority of the.
Tell me more about how splitting the vote is good thing in a two party system, I need a good fairy tale to send me to sleep
How do Republicans lose if the left vote is split into two parties?
I'm not happy with the Dems either, but I do believe they will fight against the elimination of free school lunches. I will vote for them even if this is all they did.
Counting the GOP as "Blatantly Evil" shouldn't even be a lukewarm take at this point.
It's just like Jesus said, someone who hurts a hair on a child's head is guaranteed to get into heaven /s
And lo, Jesus did taketh the loaf and the fish, and did so declare unto to the crowd that they could go forth and multiply, for the bread and the fish did belong only to himself.
Selfishness 14:7-10
Image Transcription:
News article title reading "Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority" followed by the first sentence of the article reading "As states across the country move to make sure students are well fed, Republicans have announced their intention to fight back."
Below the article screenshot is a picture of Henry J Waternoose III, the spider-like monster from Monsters Inc, saying "I'll starve a thousand children before I let this company get taxed"
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Imagine being a piece of shit as one of your party's pillars
Actually skip the imagine part
Why are they still allowed to rule? They demonstrate clearly that they are not fit for the job.
Family values means forcing children in already marginalized and impoverished families to go hungry.
Can I get a source on this? Because I know the GOP is Batshit, but this is cartoonishly evil, and I feel like a republican voter will immediately assume it's fake.
The Article
In case you wanted more proof that conservatives are evil.
The fact that my partner thought this was a real headline when I told her about it is a scathing indictment of the current republican party platform.
"The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/173668/republicans-declare-banning-universal-free-school-meals-2024-priority
I mean, maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm not against schools providing free healthy lunches to every student regardless of whether their parent makes minimum wage or is in the 1%, so long as we start taxing accordingly. I feel like if we legally make children attend school and get an education (which we should, to be clear) then we should feed them while they are there. If children are fed and learn healthy eating habits in school, it theoretically would set them up much better as they grow older, no? I don't even have children and would be happy to see my tax dollars go to school lunches.
It's also cheaper to give universal lunch than it is to means test.
Careful, that's beginning to sound like socialist talk /s
You're absolutely not wrong there. You have a heart and empathy. Children SHOULD NOT be punished for the financial situation their parents are in. A free school lunch may be the only real meal a child gets all day and that is horrible for their health and development.
We have the resources to provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner to every child in the public school system, and I absolutely think we should be doing that. Cut subsidies to boondoggles, increase taxes for the top 20%, purchase food in bulk on government contracts that have been negotiated for lower costs, and give children what they deserve.
Providing a basic need like food for them is the very least a modern rich society can do.
It would make sense if the food was actually edible. Michelle essentially ruined the school lunch system by not regulating the shortcuts taken to reduce costs of the program. Had actual investment went into it, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's a waste of money as it is, and should be reformed to be better.
Ah yes, Michelle Obama, the person who famously had zero regulatory authority, ruined school lunch. That's definitely a thing that happened.
This is real.
Wait this is satire?
It’s not satire:
https://newrepublic.com/post/173668/republicans-declare-banning-universal-free-school-meals-2024-priority
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-republic/
Me: oh, certainly that's satire!
Also me: it's......
it's...........
n...not......
.....satire?? o_o
No it isn't, and apparently it's actually. Real headline. And when I went to read a little more about it, the republican study committee did release a 2024 budget proposal eliminating free lunches (among other things).
Even if it is satire, we’ve heard them attack school lunches before. A thing must be semi-plausible to trick people. They want to destroy public schools and this will be in their playbook at least locally in some districts.
Ah yes, the good ol' "Well the fact that I believed it really says something about today's society."
I mean, the republican party has gone off the rails with their party platform the last few years that was kind of the point. Do you disagree?
I think the fact that this isn't satire and this is a real and accurate headline says a lot about our society actually.
This is something that even Putin's minions would be too scared to say aloud.
It's weird how cartoonishly evil the GOP's policies are, and yet they never seem to have problems getting any votes. I'm pretty sure if the GOP wanted to legalize pedophilia or wanted to just outright destroy the Earth, their base of voters wouldn't even blink. At least with Democratic policies, they are debatable, like I could see how somebody might potentially disagree with their execution. "There's a problem, and here's how we want to try to solve it." With GOP policies though, I just can't imagine who gets behind this shit, or I can imagine, but I can't believe those are actually real people.
Some here asking who are or would still vote for them, well in their eyes, they don't want to feed YOUR kid(s), they believe their kids are well fed. Only when when they are in need will they have empathy.
Here's an interesting tidbit (middle of page 127):
So they like increased exhaust for our children (and everyone else also) to breath?
Real talk though corporate taxation is a regressive tax on the poor, because costs get passed on as the tax is universal.
Better option is just taxing the wealthy directly. Harder, even significantly harder, but better in all respects.
Bullshit. Eliminating corporate taxes just lets the conglomerates off the hook while doing nothing to make them stop their price hikes. They'll always find another pretense to squeeze as much profit out of the people as possible.
What would ACTUALLY work is direct price ceilings, increasing the federal minimum wage to at least $20/h and closing every loophole so that what anti-profiteering and antitrust laws are ALREADY in the books actually get enforced.
Fuck minimum wage. UBI now.
If you mean UBI coupled with strict price controls then HELL YEAH!
If you mean without, though, they will just raise prices enough to render it absolutely meaningless other than as a talking point for dishonest demagogues like Andrew Yang.
We definitely need price controls too, yes.
Sure, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good (or better).
Right that's why I don't wanna raise taxes on the poor
The poor poor corporations. Won't someone think of them
Funny how when taxes for corporations go down, prices go up, taxes for corporations go up, prices go up, billions of dollars of loans are given away for free to corporations and forgiven prices still go up, and record profits are recorded across the board by corporations prices go up.
I don't think it's the taxes on corporations making prices go up.
A) I'm not worried about corporations, but about people
B) all the resentment in the world doesn't change how math works
Let's tax poor people to pay for wealthy people's children to have lunch. Great idea
Well that's a stupid ass way to go about it, I'd rather tax everyone based upon their wealth to feed all the children. The poorest would even be exempt, as they cannot bear the tax burden, while the wealthy would pay more, as they can.
Too bad nobody ever thought of that before
Ok, great, we are totally rebuilding the tax code. Let's do it. Let's set a threshold of ..... 100k before income tax kicks in. Even then, your money would be better spent targeting it.
Do we build damns in the desert?
Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Parker Dam, Painted Rock Dam, Mormon Flat Dam? Quite a lot of dams in the desert, as it turns out.
It also turns out that the administrative overhead of means-testing government aid often costs more than just providing the aid to everyone. Food is relatively cheap compared to staff, so I’m going to guess that it’s cheaper just to feed the rich kids, if they want it, rather than expend a lot of money and effort to ensure that they don’t get any. This has the side benefit of removing an often-arduous and humiliating application process for poor families, and the stigma of “poor” that humiliates children in the lunchroom.
And, holy hell, we’re talking about feeding children, I don’t know why this is so hateful to so many people.
Touche. Ok, middle of the driest part of the Sahara.
Hang on. Are you saying live government bureaucracies are inefficient and wasteful?
This whole poor people being humiliated by receiving aid discourse it's toxic as hell. Is a supermarket in the UK that recently started selling their cheapest stuff with a yellow brand, people said this about that if we're going to humiliate the poor people buying it. The only people who think that are people who are not themselves poor.
Especially when the answer is to just turn on the money gun fire it randomly around I find that offensive.
Also it's interesting how people can be too poor to have to apply for a benefit or to have that benefit means tested yet they can't be too poor to not be proud about receiving that benefit.
Yes. I know what being poor is like