A Modest Proposal: Ditch Extra Spending for School Lunch
September 28th, 2010 · No Comments · Posted in kids
We don't need no stinkin' six cents
First Lady Michelle Obama reportedly is wrestling with at least 100 House Democrats who would rather not pass a re-authorization of the nation’s school meals program if it means taking money from food stamp recipients.
The U.S. Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, approved a measure that would increase spending on child nutrition programs by $4.5 billion–including a six-cent boost to the rate the federal government reimburses school lunch–but said the only way to fund it without adding to the deficit was to remove $2.2 billion from the food stamp (SNAP) program. Re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act must now be approved by the House before the law currently in place expires.
The Senate’s funding method is a bit like taking money out of the pocket of one panhandler to put it in the hand of another panhandler. Yet, even while Congress spends billions dropping bombs on Afghanistan ($338 billion to date), the mainstream media has hailed these measly six cents as the first increase in the subsidized lunch reimbursement rate in three decades–a notion that turns out to be utterly false.
Apparently, no one in the press has actually read the rules governing the school meals program. If they had, they would know that the disputed six cents are barely more than what the lunch program receives automatically each year by way of cost of living increases. This year, in fact, the reimbursement rate has already gone up four cents–from $2.68 per lunch to $2.72–thanks to an adjustment in the Consumer Price Index.
Granted, school kitchens are broke and have been for a long time. According to the School Nutrition Association, schools that rely on the federal reimbursements to pay their expenses on average lose 35 cents with every lunch they serve, which helps explain why they feed kids high-fructose corn syrup instead of real food in order to comply with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s calorie requirements.
The six-cent increase would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. But more important in this stalled legislation is a provision that would, for the first time, give the USDA authority to regulate all foods sold in schools, possibly meaning an end–finally–to sugary drinks and candy in school vending machines, ice cream bars and fruit rollups in the deli line. That would go a long way toward compbatting the obesity epidemic that Michelle Obama has pledged to end.
So I say, Keep your six cents. Let the nation’s lunch ladies do what they have been doing for years that Congress can’t–live with what they’ve got. Congress can then get back to doing what it does best–spend money we don’t have on wars we don’t need. Somehow, the kids will survive.
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