True. But as far as I can tell nobody has mentioned free breakfast for everyone!!! yet.
I draw the line at dinner.
What about a midnight snack? One thing I always hated about Florida public schools (and I gather this is pretty much universal in the US) is that the school day begins at an ungodly hour to accommodate all sorts of non-school things.
Seriously, you want me here at 7:15 am? I went to boarding schools that didn’t make me wake up that early.
IIRC, students who qualify for free lunch are automatically eligible for free breakfast too.
And I don’t have problem with making breakfast free for everyone either, as long as breakfast isn’t a cinnamon roll and chocolate milk.
I don’t think the Feds pay the entire added cost; I think the individual school district comes up with most of it. (Note that the local community taken as a whole still shows a net profit on the deal.)
But either way, the net effect is that $100,000 additional tax revenue is spent to provide $100,000 of food. (Or $110,000 if streamlining due to the distinction elimination saves money.) Why are Americans so distressed when a program might transfer a little money from the rich to the poor?
Given that School Lunch programs were started by the Marxists Roosevelt and Truman, I’m surprised there isn’t more call to abolish them altogether. 
In some cultures, the highest-income person picks up lunch checks almost automatically. I’ve learned on this board that many Dopers are horrified to hear of that barbaric practice.
Well, whatever kids like these days, then. Cold calf brains on toast, wheat grass juice and espresso, I think?
The kids where I live typically have sushi for lunch.
Free breakfast at school is increasingly common, all over the country.
Yea, I would get breakfast and lunch at my high school. Breakfast was good when I overslept and had to rush to leave home for school on time, or when my parents forgot to buy the cereal, or when I knew that I would have a busy day with a short lunch break.
Lunch was a given, and I seldom took money to school. My parents didn’t believe in allowances, and why give me money, when I could get the lunch for free. Eat the lunch, or go hungry, those were my options. And lunch at least had 2-3 things decent (milk, fruit, and rice), with an occasional chance of awesomeness (not so bad mystery meat, seasonal foods, semi-decent pasta).
But I guess it is also a different culture and a different mindset.
Regarding the rumination about what “lesson” giving children free lunches would teach them, I would think the lesson would be that they live in a civilized first-world nation where children don’t need to go hungry. One wonders what lesson denying them food is supposed to teach them.
Granted, no one here has yet brought up any cost figures or studies of long-term impacts, but I’d be willing to bet such numbers would simply be waved away by the opponents. I think this is a good bet because this seems somewhat analogous to the debate on universal health care. The fact that it’s a far more efficient system and much lower cost per capita is well established, but it’s categorically rejected by the right because, whatever they pretend to be arguing, it’s fundamentally a fear that “undeserving bums” will get something for nothing and they will somehow be subsidizing it. But they have no problem, either in the school-lunch case or the health care analogy, paying for a vast and useless bureaucracy to keep out imaginary freeloaders.
Hogwash. Believe that “The Right ™” hates kids if it really makes you feel better.
In my office where we spend a fair amount of money we have a sign that says:
“It may be God’s work to buy a new hospital to save adorable babes and cute puppies but it still costs money we don’t have”
The good idea fairy only brings the idea, never the money. Build the puppy hospital if it makes you feel all warm inside, but we don’t have the money for the things we are committed to buying now - the ones brought by last year’s good idea fairy. Those kids you are trying to help. They’ll get to pay for this later - interest included.
I don’t wonder at all.
Our debt started its meteoric rise with the Reagan tax cuts and only started slowing down when Clinton increased taxes then resumed its meteoric rise when Bush Jr. cut taxes again.
To be sure, medicare presents a long term issue but hopefully we will have universal healthcare soon.
Social security can be made solvent simply by removing the cap.
Our military spending is about triple China’s and about 7 times Russia’s. If we limited military spending to what China and Russia spend combined, we could balance the budget.
I’d point out that you forget to put a cite for DOD deficit numbers but then again you can’t because it’s not true.
And what you did discuss - Defense Spending, Medicare and Social Security - care to comment what is the only one of these that is actually declining and declining as a percentage of GDP as opposed to what is growing?
Let’s look at what else you said.
For social security: remove the cap so that people can pay much more into the system than they will ever be allowed to take out. Translated solution: “Tax the rich!!”
For runaway entitlements such as Medicare: “presents a long term issue” (what the hell does that mean other than let’s just waive that one away!) “but hopefully we will have universal healthcare soon.” (because universal health care will be free!!!).
Yet oddly enough, there’s always money for tax breaks for megalithic multinational corporations, Wall Street, and other supposed Job Creators™ who seem to do a lot more to inflate their profits than actually create any jobs, all the while legally engaged in harmful tax avoidance schemes like offshoring and declarations of offshore ownership.
When children go hungry and the poor go without health care in the wealthiest country in the world, one which has both the wealthiest and the poorest citizens among all OECD nations with a growing disparity between them, I’d say the problem isn’t lack of money but priorities that are utterly perverted by the overwhelmingly corporate-dominated political power base.
Actually, you’re right. It’s not true that reducing our Defense spending to equal that of Russia and China combined would have balanced the FY14 budget.
It would, however, have saved approximately $346,000,000,000…which ain’t precisely chump change. (It would have left a shortfall of around $128b…the smallest deficit since the Clinton surpluses.)
Is that like Stonehenge International, Inc. 
Sorry, missed including the sourcing on that:
No, more like a sort of neologism that I created while rapidly typing standing up as I was hurrying out the door to run an errand. Feel free to substitute “large” if that assists your understanding of my post. 
I understood it just fine. I got a little chuckle is all. FTR, I’d gladly swap out $$ for DoD or special tax breaks for corporations for school lunches any day.
You should have used the “.00” too. Could have made that number of yours look just a tad bigger.
But that’s the good thing about DoD and that whole discretionary budget. You can always cut it like we are now. How are you going to do that with your run away entitlements?
And this President doesn’t even want to think about using the military and just wants give everyone a big hug. How is that working world wide these days? You really want to give Russia even more latitude?