For people who supposedly fight for the working class, the socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar sure do spend a lot of time pushing programs that would overwhelmingly benefit rich and middle-class Americans.
Their landmark “free college” and student debt cancellation proposals would disproportionately help the educated upper class, as that’s who holds most student debt and who most often obtains college degrees. And now Sanders and his socialist cohorts are pushing a bill to make school lunch at public K-12 schools free everywhere, which would similarly benefit the rich more than anyone else — directly at the working class’s expense.
It’s true! @SenSanders and I just introduced sweeping legislation to make school meals universal.
In the richest country in the world, no child should go to school hungry. https://t.co/NxTa34oSxw
— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) October 15, 2019
Their bill, the Universal School Meals Program Act of 2019, would “amend the Child Nutrition Act of 1966 and the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act to make breakfasts and lunches free for all children.” Bizarrely, they admit that they seek to do this “without demanding [students’ families] prove they are poor enough to deserve help getting three meals a day.”
Omar remarked, “In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, no child should be turned away from a meal if they cannot afford it.” The congresswoman was echoing Sanders, who said, “Today, I am proud to propose legislation to make sure that no student goes hungry at a public school.”
That’s a perfectly good point. Most people agree with the idea of feeding students whose families can’t afford it.
But it’s clear the two legislators have fallen into the same trap that’s befuddled so many socialists: conflating universal government provision with helping the poor. In reality, universal public provisions benefit the wealthy, too, and means-tested alternatives offer a vastly superior way to provide for the poor without forcing taxpayers to subsidize the upper class.
Think about it: Why should public schools provide free lunch and breakfast for every student, not just the poor ones?
As a child, I attended a high-ranking public elementary school in Barrington, Rhode Island, a notoriously wealthy beach town. My parents, along with most of the parents of my solidly middle- and upper-class classmates, were fully capable of paying for my lunches and did exactly that. It’s nonsensical to think that taxpayers, which includes the working class and the poor, should have to pay for rich kid’s lunches when their own parents are fully capable of doing so, but that’s exactly what Sanders and Omar’s bill would require.
Additionally, school lunches are already incredibly accessible.
An elementary school lunch costs just $2.48 on average, while high school meals come in at $2.74 (hint: they’re heavily subsidized to begin with). Most families can certainly afford this, and for those who can’t, we already have discounted and free lunch programs. In fact, 20 million students already receive a free lunch, and 2 million more are eligible for discounted lunches at a price of just 40 cents. But right now, these programs are means-tested, meaning that you must display some degree of an inability to pay in order to qualify. Apparently, in 2019, excluding the middle and upper classes from welfare programs is now unwoke.
Sanders and Omar want to chuck the door open and let all the children in America eat multiple meals a day at taxpayer expense. The duo points to statistics showing lingering rates of food insecurity as a justification, but to the extent that this is still a problem among school children, the answer is to fix the means-tested programs and fight the underlying causes of intergenerational poverty, which often have to do with the very welfare state they promote.
Omar and Sanders avoid all this, and instead cloak their plans in lofty-sounding rhetoric and moralizing about how food is a “human right.” (What isn’t these days?) But there’s really no reason why parents of substantial financial means shouldn’t feed their own kids. Anything else is just welfare for the rich.
