Nazi Flower Power wrote:Olerand wrote:Poverty in America is not a cut. It is an amputation. A hemorrhage.
This program is the epitome of "band-aid solutions". And I think it shows how far America has gone, to the right that is, when "band-aids" against poverty start to seem like legitimate "surgeries", and issues that the American "Left" takes to heart and wants to defend.
Because they can only alleviate the pain of poverty, they cannot fight poverty.
And if you compare the cost of providing free school lunches to the cost of restructuring the whole economy, it's kind of like comparing the cost of a band-aid to the cost of a heart transplant. Just because something is small and only tackles a limited range of problems doesn't mean it's not cost-effective for what it does.
^ This.
Any progress, even if it's small, is progress. It's unlikely that the US would be (politically) able to invest the needed amount to tackle child poverty, which would probably be somewhere between an additional spending of 2 and 4% of GDP. Free school lunches reduces the effects of poverty, for not a large cost. It's a good "band-aid" - and a very helpful band-aid - until the political environment allows for the hundreds of billions of dollars of spending needed to combat child poverty.