A Boring Dystopia

Isn't this several years old, or is it happening again?

My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I'm self employed with no benefits so she's been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.

They don't threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven't paid your debt in full. We're in Ohio.

If you want to look at this situation from an economic point of view ..... what's cheaper?

Pay a kids lunch every day for about 12-14 years .... and for a growing kid, the price wouldn't be that much, especially if you are paying in bulk amounts for hundreds or thousands of kids.

or

Don't pay their lunch, let the parents go into debt, take the kids into foster care .... now you as the government have to pay for legal expenses to take the kid away, expenses to have police and social service workers to do the work, foster expenses to house the kid and care for them (now you are having to pay for every single meal for them for years), give up the kid once they become of age and go out on their own after foster care as a disillusioned, angry and frustrated young man or woman who will more than likely end up on the street dealing drugs, crime or prostitution ... who will then grow up causing or contributing to crime and increasing the costs of police, legal, emergency health care, security and penitentiary .... and chances are they will have children who will end up at school not being able to pay for their lunch

....

If you pay to help the kid when they are young, there is more of a chance they will grow up to be a contributing healthy member of society. If you don't they will become a lifelong burden on society and cause endless expenses that will be far more money than any school lunches you could have bought when they were ten years old.

I don't think there's any other country in the world that has such policies.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/us/pennsylvania-school-lunch-debt-trnd

Unless this is happening again, this story is from 2019. Still bad, just not recent

If every American learned what citizens in other 1st world countries have that we don't, there would be a revolution tomorrow.

Not wanting to feed children doesn’t seem very pro-life.

Grew up with lunch debt as a kid and that headline boils my blood in ways I probably shouldn't say out loud.

I’m from this region of Pennsylvania. Abuse and bullying is protected by the culture of this region. The sheriff’s office has done mass murders against strikers in the coal fields. 1860’s I believe. This guy stepped down. But his sentiment carries far in the community. It’s a bigoted hate filled hole.

A literal gun cult is financing far right radicals into local politics. A hate group is trying to force schools to out children who say they are gay. And YouTube protects their account where they post hours of hate content.

I worked with the president of the group before. He was fired from his job because he was accused of stealing $15,000.

Unfortunately nothing new. I remember as a kid that if you didn’t have money in your lunch account, your lunch was taken away and if you were lucky they’d have a peanut butter sandwich for you.

If you were in a negative balance, such as if your parents were unable to pay, then you’d also be restricted from certain activities and pressured to make your parents pay what was owed.

The same as debtors prison, how is that supposed to fix anything? Accomplishes literally nothing other than punishing people for being poor.

how about you start punishing companies for not paying people a livable wage?