The School Lunch Program With an Unappetizing Report Card
The first lady’s project is plagued by complaints of inedible meals, wasted food and misspent funds.
– wsj.com
Nearly five years after passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010…. is an attempt to stem childhood obesity and hunger by providing healthier school meals…
The…Act funds a number of child-nutrition programs including the National School Lunch Program, which costs $12 billion a year—plus $3 billion for breakfast programs—and serves nearly 32 million children, about 45% of the total U.S. youth population…
…an official with the USDA’s Office of Inspector General testified that the National School Lunch Program has “high rates of improper payments.” Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) has pegged the waste in the billions of dollars…
…There has not been a significant decline in childhood obesity rates since 2010, and some data show obesity going up. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, five states had childhood obesity rates from 15%-19% in 2009. In 2013 eight states had rates that high.
We Respond & Your Comments
We’re all for feeding hungry kids. Nor do we object to paying taxes to do so.
Here’s what we do object to:
- Walking into a room ¼ mile from our Eugene house and seeing well off teens scarfing up free hamburgers all summer because their parents are too lazy to feed them;
- The program’s goal being changed from finding hungry kids and feeding them to advertising free eats for everybody so the local district can suck more of our money in;
- Washington D.C. money vacuums telling us that 45% of the total U.S. youth population would go hungry if we didn’t feed them.
This is simply another government program sold to Oregonians as something “for the children” and morphing into a money pit that exists to take money we earned and spread it around to cities like Eugene to get votes in the next election.
I work for a before and after school childcare program. If a free meal program is offered at one of our sites, we are required to have each child take a full meal whether they want or need it! It is a big waste of money! I see so much food being thrown away! So many flaws with this program and so wasteful!