You mean those countries where 99% of the wealth and power is controlled by a dictator and his family/cronies?

ungodly?

i think what we spend on them per kid per meal is something like $1.60 or something. that's the number that stuck in my head from that Jamie Oliver show. It's nowhere near $5-6 like you suggest. You're wayyyyyyyyy off.

When I think of libertarianism, I think Uganda.

This has nothing to do with my arguement and also isn't true. The United States is pretty high on the economic freedom scale but there aren't any African countries above it. We are really high up there but wasting tax money like this isn'tr why and only moves us down. Sorry but $8,000,000,000 here and there does start to add up.

FFS - it's 8 billion over 10 years. At least try to be intellectually honest and call it 800 million instead of using the "big fearful number" tactic.

European health care.

Much cheaper, much better.

So I looked it up and it is $2.68. So we need to add $2 more to make these lunches healthier?

Europeans are the ones called socialists and nanny states. The opposite of what panerd wants.

Now seems like a good a time as any to break this out:

lol. only $800,000,000 a year.

okay. 2.68...so i wasn't bad.

It's also not only the menu options you have to look at, but the way in which they're prepared. frozen stuff with no nutrients...canned fruits full of sugar, bleached white flour.

look at what they can provide for $2.68. Now imagine how much better it could be for $4.68. It's like going from a smartcar to a ferrari.

If you can find a restaurant to cater for <$5 per head, have at it.

Countries with little to no rules and regulations. No big government bueracracies. All the horrible things ruining this country.

which is a drop in the federal budget, especially when you look at some of the other stuff that you and i both agree could be cut.

fuck...buy one less f-22 and you could fund the entire project for like...50 years (aren't they like $40,000,000,000 each?)

I'm not saying just tack it onto the budget forever...but it'd sure be easy to find bullshit useless stuff to cut to save way more money than that per year.

which is ~$3 per year per person, or less than 2/3rd of a penny per day.

Fuck. I have been on here for way to long on this. (This is what happens when I go on vacation and spend 10+ days away from the political threads) If you guys don't think spending $800,000,000 a year more on free and reduced lunch is a waste of money than you aren't going to agree with me. Attack me being a Libertarian all you want $800,000,000 is a huge waste of money. One really has nothing to do with the other here.

Cartman's cartoon is actually pretty funny. (has nothing to do with how $800,000,000 is being spent but it is funny)

My whole point is this: I know how important school lunches are in many districts. Instead of a one-size-fits-all legislation in which a high percentage of the actual expenditures will stay in Washington, local school districts and states (to some extent) can target specific schools and school districts in better meeting a more direct need to our kids. More control (and taxation revenues) should be given locally. Some of it will be mismanaged, some wasted but some will be more beneficial than the federal bureaucracy in which most of it will be wasted (i.e., little or no cost/benefit); not out of stupidity, but out of the nature of how they have to work (and the myriad of conflicting, confusing and restrictive federal laws).

.0002% of our budget.

fair enough. they could probably also get fresher food. although then you give up the bulk purchasing power of the federal government and its ability to get the food very cheap (although it's unhealthy). So there's a huge tradeoff there also.

I will gladly donate $3 (and more) to my local school district to help feed our kids better.

It's that kind of thinking (I'm including defense here, hold your horses) that got that fucker that bloated in the first place. It's like a 350 lb guy saying, "Fuck it I'm huge, pizza for lunch is not a problem."

Is it a bad expense if the $800 million a year saves $2 billion in health care expenses down the line a year?

Isn't this what it's about? Healthier kids make healthier adults which makes less unnecessary health care costs. Isn't dumping a couple hundred bucks a year on a kid better than having to cover their triple bypass and diabetes medication in 30 years?

no shit, I don't disagree with you at all on paragraph 2. I am just saying that 1,000 "small" billion dollar projects is how we got to a trillion dollar deficit. And they most likely aren't going to cut anything to pay for this. They never cut anything.

Not to mention getting on board with buying local organically grown foods and supporting sustainable agriculture locally (like many restaurants do around here). Certain federal laws prevent that (thanks to the Big Agri-business lobby).

Are you sure that will be the benefit?

I don't know the numbers on it. I'm sure there is a study somewhere on the cost savings of an obese person vs non-obese person.

This thread and the health care thread is filled with people claiming that we dump all this money into people who are obese. So wouldn't creating less obese individuals save a lot of money? I guess I just feel if our obesity rate can go down, it's less of a burden on our insurance premiums and Medicare costs.

Just ran a Google search, says obese people spend $1500 more a year on health care costs.

The Cost of Obesity: $147 Billion Per Year, Almost 10 Percent of U.S. Medical Costs - ABC News

I just saw this and thanks it made my day. I resemble a few of these types.lol.

According the Wikipedia, a F-22 costs 150 million. And they're just so much cooler than a school lunch.

i could have sworn they cost more. oh well.

b2 stealth bombers do cost billions, right?

I think almost a billion a plane.

This lunch debate really shows the power, and beauty of the web. we really don't know what we are talking about. no numbers, little bill language, no previous stats, etc.

really, this has come down to: because the gov't has messed up so much, 8 billion on anything is pretty much a waste.

I think these kind of debates predate the intertubes by a longshot.

I'm no fan of socialism, but it's one step above our system. We have had socialist spending without the socialist services.

The driving force behind any American school food program is lucrative contracts for well-connected companies. That doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't do it, but let's understand the playing field.

You don't seem to understand the definition of socialism. It has nothing to do with spending or services. There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that high taxes and/or government spending in a sector is socialism, when that simply isn't the case.

Spending/services is the mechanism for modern socialist-like governments.

Have mercy, I wish you hadn't have posted those details.

That's an even worse clusterfuck than I imagined.

Dude, it's not 8 billion, it's 8,000,000,000. LOOK AT ALL THOSE FUCKING ZEROES!!!

Spending has nothing to do with the definition of socialism. Services would only be true if the means of production of the services was owned and controlled by the government.

I'm not entirely sure why people get up in arms about 800 million a year on healthier school lunches, but seem to barely bat an eye over the massive defense spending that happens (and is happening currently). Oh well.

I really don't see the cost to retrofit school lunch programs to make them offer healthier food as been a waste at all, especially since it will probably have effects on creating healthier adults, which will reduce the increase in my insurance premiums and federal health care spending costs.

This has been mentioned ad naseum, but I guess I'll try it again.

No one is against healthier lunches for kids. Whether that will lead to healthier adults is debatable, but that's not even the point.

The point is, how much of that money will actually go towards accomplishing that lofty goal? How much instead will be spent on increasing bureaucracy? Jobs, pensions, office space, furniture, etc. What if I were to tell you that we could spend 800 million a year to make school lunches marginally better?

This happens so often with people who don't like big government. You assume we're necessarily against the goal of what's being proposed when much more often I would agree with the goal, but think it will go unfulfilled while wasting money.

Which it necessarily must be.

And you can't talk about services without talking about spending.

"Socialism" has a couple of different meanings. It's a political/economic philosophy, but it's also a buzz-word for the modern governments that are inspired by some version of that philosphy. I'm not making a philosophic comment. I'm just comparing the liberal European paradise governments that many here seem to long for, but are targeting the wrong things to try to get closer to those ideals. The general idea here seems to be that just spending money on programs with inspiring titles gets us where we want to be. I think reform of our government has to be way more complicated than that.

You can turn that around and wonder why so many people seem to understand that military spending is really all about economic and government growth, politically connected companies (basically the laundering of tax money), but can't recognize that the same principals drive non-military spending as well.

Because that's entirely what it seems like when you don't offer any counter proposals.

I appreciated Bucc's post and I think there is some very good thought behind it and someway to blend both approaches would be optimal. But saying this money doesn't help anything and not offer ANYTHING in response to childhood obesity isn't exactly a serious response to the problem.

Who said that?

Of course the differences being the end result ;). Inefficiency is going to happen in either case, but it is probably better to improve school lunches than starting unneccessary wars in the Middle East.

True, if that's the choice.

But do you really think kids are fat because our government doesn't spend enough money?

And the "buzzword" meaning is simply wrong. It is a bastardization of the definition. And one that many people mistakenly latch on to.

I think that unhealthy school lunches definitely increase the chances of kids getting fat. As pointed out, studies have shown that kids that eat school lunches are fatter than those than bring their own lunch from home.

Making those lunches healthier will have a very positive effect, IMO. For one, there is the caloric intake and fat content of the food they are presently injesting and secondly it'll start kids on good eating habits (if you start them on health eating from an early age, it'll carry forward).

Maybe kids wouldn't be as fat if schools would stop cutting back on recess time and PE?

Don't have a choice if they aren't state requirements and other things are.