Ban the Free Lunch!

While there are some hard-hearted Scrooges out there who'd like to see free breakfast and lunch programs (and probably free after school care, too) done away with entirely as a frivolous waste of taxpayer funds, they are few. But why argue against a position that's actually being taken when it's so much easier to beg the question, and create a straw man that's much easier to knock down?

The free meal program at schools is a good idea that, like so many other good ideas brought to you from Your Government, At Work, is poorly administered and full of loopholes that both end-users and the schools have found ways to take advantage of. Fraud perpetrated by parents who either get onto the program without any real need or lie to stay on it after their economic situation has improved (and I don't really blame them, frankly), is a problem. But this is a drop in the bucket compared to the institutional, wholesale thievery engaged in by schools that use this program to shamelessly swindle extra federal and state money from taxpayers.

Where I live, schools advertise every spring that the "free" lunch program is open to anyone-child or adult-who can drag themselves through the door of their local elementary school between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Why do they do this? The schools claim it's because so many kids are not provided regular, nutritional meals during the summer holidays in our generally middle-to-upper-middle class suburb. But at the same time, we're being told our kids are all too fat. How's that work, exactly?

The truth is that the more "free" lunches a school doles out during the year (including the summer) the more funding they get the next year for this program. The more "students" they show, each year, receiving "free" meals (and this extends to academic areas such as ESL, and Title 9 reading programs, too), the more money the feds and the state give the particular school. This is an enormous bonus for the schools because they actually make money on each free lunch. That's right, a public school pulls down a hefty profit on each "free" lunch they serve, and "free" breakfast is even more profitable. The heavily subsidized meal might cost the school $1.75 to produce, while the feds and state together provide something approximately $4.80 for each one.

Do the math. That's a profit of $3.05 on each "free" lunch served, about a 63% markup. That's the kind of profit for which your local McDonald's or independent

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