Are There No Workhouses?

There are several possible explanations for an actual, honest-to-goodness lawmaker floating an actual proposal like this one. First, said lawmaker actively hates anyone who might not have money. That's entirely possible, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume that's not it (I agree it assumes a fact not in evidence but I'm going to assume it anyway). The second, and probably most likely, explanation is that he got caught saying something not completely batshit and reeking of blithering idiocy, and now in a panic he realizes he has to make up for it. So he's floating it as fodder to please the Crazy Caucus, without any real intention of putting such legislation together. Frankly, that's also bad. He's a lawmaker. I personally think it's a bad idea to be throwing patently stupid shit you have no real intention of trying to do out into the ether, for the sole purpose of making some headlines to placate crazy people. That's not what we pay you people for. There's actually a third possibility, and that is that the good Congressman is of the genuine opinion that public education is un-American, and that all schools should be private and that the only kids who should even be going to school are the children of well-off people--together with a smattering of a few super-smart, super-lucky poor kids who can get scholarships and thus benefit from the kindness and beneficence of rich people. The rest of the poor folks should just dispense with wasting everyone's time, and put their kids directly into the work force as soon as possible. Nine or ten leaps to mind--that certainly wasn't uncommon back in the days before un-American things like child labor laws came into being.

I'm not even going to touch on the whole argument that trying to implement something like this will make poor kids feel bad. It probably would, but that's only one piece of why it's such a stupid proposal that it can't possibly be being floated with any actual serious thought that it's going to be good for kids or schools. For one thing, I'd point out that in a pure and literal sense, every child gets free lunch. No, really. My kids don't qualify for free/reduced lunches, but they don't pay for the lunches. Their parents pay for their lunches. It's not as though they're cleaning hotel rooms or working a night shift at the casino to get their lunch money. So it's absurd to say that we have to be "instilling in kids the idea that there's no free lunch." Because if that's what we're after, then you have to stop letting middle class kids' parents pay for their lunches, too. Otherwise, the only "statement" you're making is that you're going to get treated worse if you don't have money than if you do. One hardly needs legislation like this to make that piece of wisdom available.

For another thing, when he blithely acknowledges that "you might have some administrative problems with it," he's making a laughable understatement. In many states, the majority of public school districts have at least half the kids qualify for free or reduced lunch. At the elementary school my younger daughter attends, it's 66%--and that's the wealthiest school in the district (some of our district's schools are over 80%). It's an elementary school with an enrollment of about 450 kids. So, under this man's proposal, somebody somewhere has to find actual, make-work McJobs for 300 kids ages 5-11 to do during the day TO EARN THEIR FOOD, while the other 150 kids, I don't know, go do something else. How does this work? What can you possibly come up with for that many kids to do? And when do they do their McJobs? During the unbelievably regimented, legislated-nine-ways-to-Sunday school day? Just exactly when the hell are they supposed to cram for their stupid standardized tests that you expect them to pass if you're going to pay their teachers? And who's going to supervise those kids? And train them to do the jobs? Their teachers? It's just such complete, patent, unrestrained idiocy that I can't honestly expect that he really has any thought that anyone would really try this.

Along with the sort of cavalier acknowledgement that such a proposal maybe, just maybe, might possibly have an administrative difficulty or two (or a thousand), he also shrugs and states that the program "will probably cost you money." In other words, he acknowledges that implementing such a colossally batshit idea will be more expensive than actually paying for the lunches themselves. This strongly suggests that the whole point of this little proposal has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility but everything to do with assumptions about why some people's parents might be poor. I leave it to your imagination to think what those assumptions might be.

UPDATE: There's no such thing as a free lunch. Unless, of course, you're the jagoff telling poor kids that there's no such thing as a free lunch. If you're that guy, well, yeah, natch. Free lunches all around. I really have no further comment because they all involve a lot of potty words.