What’s crazy to me is it seems like they just want children to suffer. They want to force women to give birth, but then don’t give a shit about what happens to the children after. On top of that, it’s like they are trying to make them suffer even more for their parents being unable to provide.
I could somewhat get attacking programs for adults. Still disagree, but I guess it’s the “they should be able to provide for themselves” mentality. But then doing this for children when they are literally unable to provide for themselves or have any responsibility for being hungry. Yes, let’s make the helpless children suffer.
Disgusting times we live in.
They want to force children into the labor pool. Can’t afford to eat? Get a job Timmy! Oh and by the way if you don’t pay your school lunch debt, we’re calling CPS and taking you away from your parents. So get to work!
They see poor people as inherently bad parents. They want ways to take away poor minority children from their parents, and lunch debt is a great way to get them on the radar for that.
And where do they intend to place them once they get an excuse to break up the family?
I think the rich well adjusted foster family is largely a TV creation.
Maybe they’ll just straight turn group homes into factories.
You know, I try to keep an open mind and try to understand how the other side could come to the conclusions they do, but sometimes they really make it difficult. I genuinely don’t get how this could be construed as anything other than malicious. What’s the benefit in this? How is this “thinking of the children?” How did a political party come to represent views that are so aggressively anti-humanity? It’s such a bizarre platform to attach yourself to so proudly and openly.
Sometime there is no rationality in those people/political party, they exist just to be destructive and promote hatred no matter the reason.
They wanted to promote child marriage.
They wanted to rape children and get away with it by forcing them to marry them.
They wanted to take out PPP loan on younger generations and tell them to go and fucking die.
They want to ban abortion without giving any exception even for raped victim or a miscarriage.
I could go on and on and on about it. Sometime, there is no reasoning with monsters and they need to be destroyed, period.
It’s insane seeing how they’ve built themselves on a platform of strictly hate. It seems like they’re never for things only against things. Well I guess outside of the child marriage thing seems they’re pretty for that. It’s so strange to me that in 2023 the republican party has regressed into essentially a draconian early industrial revolution era roll back of rights. I mean they’re even repealing child labor laws. It’s literally like they want to remove all progress from the last couple centuries. It blows my mind that this is acceptable in our country in the era.
It’s because conservatism is fundamentally reactionary. They don’t seem to be professing any particular ideology because they aren’t. They never have. It’s always been about opposing the ideology of others.
It’s also why it’s so insidious. You can’t pin down someone who doesn’t believe I’m anything.
I’d add to that and say conservatism is an inherently selfish ideology, in addition to reactionary. Every conservative policy, and every value they proclaim, is firmly founded in looking out for one’s self at the expense of their community.
Ah, student loans are, in fact, a problem. One-time relief of student debts is a good thing - provided there are no new debts on such a scale and the mechanism changes after that.
Charity sponsorship of students is a good thing without doubt. Private stipends are a good thing. But when loans which are not going to be returned in a normal way are becoming that common, then something is wrong and should be fixed, not poured more money into.
They are a cause of inflation in education (which, of course, harms the students as well), of people like AOC talking and being listened about economics, because on paper they would be qualified, and so on.
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Tearing down women’s rights. Ruining queer people’s life, especially trans people. Making sure children can’t eat for free. Wow. Quite the priorities over at the Republican party.
I’m not American, I’ve just been looking from afar for a long time now. But from everything I’m seeing… it feels like they’re going to be in for quite the rude awakening in 2024.
Unless you’re Russian, you probably aren’t familiar with living in the kind of media environment we have which can cause these clearly absurd ideas to seem normal for people to have. This lunacy is within our overton window. Centrists think it’s about half right. Liberals think it’s wrong but more or less fair to hold these views. A younger and further left contingent which has almost no representation in the government (because we put elecrions upnfor sale in 2010 with Citizens United) but is growing is the only group who finds this kind of thing completely unacceptable.
imagine being in the strategy meeting with your team, when they suggest a play based on suspending withdrawing food from child would go well with your voters.
imagine agreeing to go with it. getting a speech written about it and one day standing at the lectern to say in front of crowd of assembled people “it is not our responsiblity to feed children”. and then pausing for applause and going home and telling your spouse, “today went great”.
in this supply chain of inhumanity, there were so many opportunities for the heart to say “yo…something is off here…cant quite put my finger on it…but it doesnt seem…right ?.”
to sail through all those checkpoints of human decency, and go through with it, is nothing less than psychopathy.
The horrifying thing is that there are people out there who will consider it the right thing to do.
What. The. Fuck. Is wrong. With. These people?
It is just so incredibly odd to me. I grew up in a baptist church (would never step foot in one again.) The people there genuinely seemed to do good work, caring for the poor, donating toys to children, food as well. I do not understand where this push from the right came from. This is incredibly cruel and inhumane.
I do not understand where this push from the right came from.
This is incredibly cruel and inhumane.
So, you do understand.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m absolutely not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or anything similar, but it’s starting to show that all of them have forgotten where they came from or the stories of where their family members came from. Most of these people were raised by Depression-Era parents who, without exaggeration, suffered and died due to lack of affordable food options. I’m sure some Republicans even experienced that same problem themselves in their childhood.
I used to believe the ignorance of how important providing basic nutrition to the next generation is was based on a lack of life experience, and that may be true for some, but there’s no way every single one of them has no surface-level knowledge of true hardship. They have heard about it, read about it, and some have witnessed it firsthand.
So to answer the question, it’s either a part of some long-term plan to control the public for their means (which is evil) or they are selfish pricks (which when you are in government, makes you evil). Unfortunately, it’s looking like both.
The whole point in these kind of moves is to cause congestion and exhaustion in political movement.
It’s a struggle to campaign for actual improvements when we’re all stuck fighting garbage like this all the time.
It’s deliberate obstruction and a standard GOP play
Given that the Republicans are nominally a Christian party, has no one in the party had a look at what Jesus taught about feeding the hungry? It is pretty clear, and it is NOT this.
The problem is, they’re ignoring Matthew 25:35 in favor of 2 Thessalonians 3:10.
The children yearn for the mines, for only the mines make them worthy of a hearty meal.
Also thank you for addressing the “but the bible is progressive akshully” bullshit. No it’s not. Never has been. The new testament is less backwards, but to dismiss the old testament entirely is hypocritical and maybe even heretical. The bible is problematic if you look at it objectively, as is any form of moral prescriptivism from millennia ago.
Beyond disgusting. Keep the kids hungry so they can’t learn while sitting in their underfunded classrooms. Uneducated masses ripe for the conservative picking. Can’t see through their lies if you’ve never been taught how to think. I hate it here…
Just evil… no nuance needed.
Yes. it just breaks my heart that people seem to have a goal to make the lives of the vulnerable as hard as possible.
Really putting evil front and center this time, huh.
I personally cannot stand the idea of children from low income househodls having something to eat
Nothing would surprise me from them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they announced wheelchair bans. For a party that openly promotes misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia… I wouldn’t be surprised if they went full tilt into ableism.
Just normal GOP evil.
“There is no such thing as a free lunch”, they said :(
To pull more of the article into the comment section:
The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”
Of note is that the CEP is not even something every school participates in; it is a meal service program reserved for qualifying schools and districts in low-income areas. The program enables schools that predominantly serve children from low-income backgrounds to offer all students free breakfast and lunch, instead of means-testing them and having to manage collecting applications on an individual basis. As with many universal-oriented programs, it is more practically efficient and, as a bonus, lifts all boats. This is what Republicans are looking to eliminate.
It’s the kind of provision that many would want every school to participate in. Why not guarantee all our children are well fed as they learn and think about our world and their place in it, after all?
I’m reluctant to use the word “evil”, but I can’t think of another word that accurately describes their goals and behavior. They simply hate anyone who isn’t just like them. Different race? SUFFER AND DIE. Different economic bracket? SUFFER AND DIE. Different beliefs on sexuality? SUFFER AND DIE.
They think that others are a threat to the “moral fabric” of America, but they themselves are a threat to the mere existence of millions of Americans.
How did this get normalized? Why is this even something that is even considered debatable? As a society, feeding our children should be the first priority.
I’m flubbered.
Echo chambers that reinforce the lie that democrats want to take your money to pay for irresponsible people’s children.
Maybe they are irresponsible, but that’s not their kids fault. Feeding kids regardless of who their parents are, is a basic morality thing.
i understand its a bullshit argument, but even if were true, idgaf why kids dont have food, i want them to get food one way or another
Well, sweeping chimneys and working night shifts in abattoirs is a good way of acquiring the money for it!
/S
Why do they want the children to suffer for it though??? ~Cherri
the unplanned kids that arrived under anti abortion laws.
Literally everyone in this comment section is missing “regardless of the individual eligibility of each student”. Everyone is getting hysterical over something that isn’t even in the cards.
Of course a lot of kids rely on free school lunches and they aren’t trying to take that away. They’re trying to restrict free lunches to kids with parents who are actually incapable of feeding them. If parents can afford food for their kids, feed your fucking kids.
I’m admittedly not familiar with how the program works but I suspect that “totally bulletproof and unbiased eligibility criteria that can’t / won’t be weaponized against specific people groups” isn’t something that it guarantees
Why…… I grew up on free and reduced lunches. The return on investment here is immense.
Why? Assuming this is not a rhetorical question, it follows directly from the core authoritarian principle of Conservatism in the U.S.: Moral Hierarchy. That is to say, Those who rule are privileged above those who serve, and this is the basis of a ranked ever-swelling staircase of privilege.
Any action or policy that supports the hierarchy is divine, and whatever threatens the hierarchy is evil. Free food, or food as a right, is antithetical to Conservatism because it diminishes a key point of leverage held by rulers going up the chain. When a person is fed, they are less inclined to honor the privilege of their supposed rulers. When a person is truly hungry, they are highly motivated to submit, and even to support the hierarchy that provides them with any limited access to food.
In this philosophy, the ROI of free lunch is negative. The same argument applies to most forms of welfare.
The cruelty is the point.
I make six figures working at the highest levels of my career in support of government agencies. I used free/reduced lunches my entire schooling. It’s super ridiculous
Same, my property tax for this month alone will have more than paid for my entire schooling career of subsidized food.
Honestly what’s an extra few hundred a year in taxes on the multiple thousands I’m already being asked to pay? Our district went free meals during covid and just kept it up. Free breakfast and lunch and there’s no more stigma for getting it since it’s everyone getting it.
Everyone seems happy about this, and it helps kids do better in school. Better than wasting all that food just because someone can’t pay the $1-3.
Also, Republicans (supposedly) want people to get off of government assistance and earn money for themselves. You know what’s a great way to do that? Get a good paying job. And a good way to get one of those is to pay attention and learn while you’re in school.
However, if your family is poor and you need to skip meals, you’ll be more concerned with when your next meal is. You won’t pay attention and you’ll have limited options to break the poverty cycle when you grow up. This leads to people still needing government assistance.
Just going from the supposed Republican talking points of “getting people off government assistance is good,” free school lunches is a good idea.
And before anyone comments “just give the lunches to the kids who need them instead of everyone”: Social pressure works against this. Kids don’t want to stand out and being the kid that gets the free school meal is seen as a negative thing by many kids. Kids would rather skip meals than open themselves up to bullying like this. By giving free school lunches to everyone, the kids that need it can get their lunches without any social stigma.
Along with funding for libraries, I think free school lunches are a great use of taxpayer money!
Obviously being nice to 1 person just leads to communism! I’ll bet you now believe that people should have access to food, clean water, clean air, health care, and shelter as well? DON’T YOU!?
I do as well. :-)
Same here, kept me fed during my high school years. Don’t know what I would’ve done without it.
Don’t you know? The only necessary welfare is mine
british comic stuart lee on the subject.
