Literally, a "free lunch" vs working. Perpetual childhood vs responsibility. Of course, the free lunch will always be more immediately popular with people who never ask who pays for it. https://t.co/6t9Q3sxof9
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) March 18, 2023
There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch! — the recurring rejoinder from people who’ve never missed a meal in their lives, towards any suggestion that might make *other* peoples’ lives less difficult.
The intellectual wing of the party, explicitly arguing on behalf of loosened child labor restrictions at the expense of feeding hungry children. I really hope the party runs on his message. https://t.co/Q6KwDfOYYP
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) March 18, 2023
Ben Shapiro seems to be Patient Zero for the latest in-group tantrum:
Ben Shapiro: Every Unborn Child Is Precious
Also Ben Shapiro: Feeding children is overrated https://t.co/tRp7TaVfqm
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) March 15, 2023
What is cheaper? Giving every kid free lunch at school… or like arresting their parents, separating children from their families, and presumably institutionalizing those children so the government isn't just paying for lunch it's also paying for breakfast, dinner, and housing.
— Craig Harrington (@Craigipedia) March 15, 2023
Universal free school lunch is such a great hill to die on because even people who are sympathetic to means-testing in other domains are like, just feed all the kids what are we doing here https://t.co/U7mbJV71mt
— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) March 15, 2023
There's a whole book to be written about how much right-wing ideology consists of trying to complicate the obvious, empirically-supported truths that money solves poverty, food solves hunger and housing solves homelessness.
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) March 15, 2023
Remember when Michelle Obama tried to make school lunches more healthy and these goons all lost their minds? pic.twitter.com/eww7zBOj2F
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) March 15, 2023
I personally love that going into 2024 the Republicans’ main campaign messages are “We’ll make it illegal for your girlfriend to break up with you” and “the children yearn for the mines.” pic.twitter.com/ZPVRnw4xRS
— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) March 19, 2023
Baud
These people always assume that liberal Dems don’t pay taxes.
NotMax
“Dems itching to dump all those lunchroom cashiers into the unemployment line.”
//
Jeffg166
I love the look on the kids faces in the photo with Huckabee. They see their grim lives unfolding.
Baud
@NotMax:
Dems kicking the moneylenders out of the school cafeteria.
WaterGirl
What the fuck is wrong with these people? part one million.
Roger Moore
A critical tenet of conservatism is that rich people only respond to rewards and poor people only respond to punishments. That’s why it’s important to starve poor children. We must teach them that poverty is bad, and starvation is the best way to do it.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I thought they liked people who didn’t pay taxes. Doesn’t the Ochre Ogre 👹 brag about it?
eclare
@Jeffg166: Those faces…kids know what the truth is. Compare to kids’ reactions around Obama, they were happy to be around him.
Elizabelle
@Jeffg166: Those children look like hostages.
Stupid white people with child hostages.
AntiCliche
could someone post some context regarding Moira’s “We’ll make it illegal for your girlfriend to break up with you” pseudo quote?
trollhattan
From “It does not take that much to feed a child” to “spend hundreds of millions on disproportionately unhealthy lunches” in 5.2 seconds. He’s like the Civic Si of konservative talkers.
Raoul Paste
Given the loaves and fishes story, I’d say, Jesus was in favour of feeding people
Edit: And for free
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore: Meanwhile, you cannot get a CEO to show up for work without meeting their extortion demands.
They fail at your company, and then move onward and upward.
Dorothy A. Winsor
What kind of person denies food to hungry children?
Shame on them
rikyrah
Them being against free lunches for children…
while trying to loosen child labor laws….
fits them to a tee.
They disgust me.
NotMax
@Raoul Paste
Hearsay. Inadmissable.
//
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
They’re probably concerned about kids dining on Tbone steaks for free.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
There was literally a person in the Twitter replies to @figgityfigs’ Tweet saying, “Sounds like a great coffee and a resilient young person!” to the hypothetical of a 9y/o Starbucks barista. I can’t fucking even. I can only hope it was dishonest trolling and not unironic sincerity
eclare
@NotMax: Hahaha….
Scout211
TANSTAAFL was literally one of the textbooks for my college Econ 101 class, lo those many years ago.
I didn’t really get it then either, being a Sociology and Social Work major. I just don’t get these people who want to harm so many.
ETA: I linked to the original edition, but Amazon had a newer edition that was described as “libertarian economics”.
Geminid
Vernal Equinox at 5:24 pm!
I hope it’s a good Spring for all of us.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Raoul Paste:
That came up in Baseball Boy’s thread. Y’know what his response was?
It’s funny that he thinks he’s making a good point. Means-testing is costly and stupid
Anne Laurie
I assumed it referred (at least in part) to the increasing number of GOP-controlled states where men get preemptive veto power over their female partners’ choices around abortion.
There’s a dude in Texas suing women in another state for telling his ex-girlfriend where she could get mifopristone pills… per Texas law means he can’t actually punish his partner, but conservatives found this kewl loophole they hope will intimidate women nation-wide.
Old School
Elizabelle
“Richest country in the world.” Hmmm hmmm hmmm.
I wonder if that canard is still true. Looking at Americans as a whole, and dropping the billionaires and gazillionaires who skew the numbers out.
Anyway
@Roger Moore:
Yes, it’s carrots for the haves and sticks for the have-nots
davecb
The phrase “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” refers to bars offering free snacks, paid for by raising the price of drinks.
The only reason you’re hearing it in this discussion is to trick people into associating something they already know with an unrelated lie the speaker is pushing. One might call it argumentum ad distractum, or “oh look, a squirrel” (;-))
trollhattan
Xi did not get the aircraft-carrier table treatment from Putin. Which is better–Rooshin vaccine or Sino vaccine? Hope we find out!
satby
@Geminid: The actual Chicagohenge picture should post soon, here’s this morning’s preview.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
What’s wrong with child labor? They’re the perfect size for crawling down a mine shaft and digging for coal.
Anoniminous
@Elizabelle:
Company has an owner and nine employees. The company pays $1 million in salaries and the average salary is $100,000/year. The employees each get $10,000/year and the owner gets $910,000/year.
Isn’t mathematical analysis wonderful?
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: If we made that up, people who said that we were exaggerating; it would be unbelievable.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@WaterGirl:
It’s been said many times: if it were a script for a TV show, it would’ve been rejected in the writers’ room for being too on the nose
Baud
@Elizabelle:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country
Elizabelle
@Anoniminous: That’s what I am thinking.
@Baud: Thank you. US at number 5, although no universal healthcare, and you can lose your house (and your job) if your bills are too high. So, median income might be relatively high, but actual financial security is not.
We are not like those EU countries, or Canada. Interesting the UAE is in there at #2.
gwangung
There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch—
And if you don’t feed kids, a) you get physically undernourished recruits for the army, b) you waste the money in education by not allowing kids to focus properly, and c) you get an undernourished work force who are going to be outcompete by healthier work forces elsewhere in the world..
That’s BAAAAD news for whatever side of he political spectrum you sit on.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
We’re pretty up there in wealth. Lack of money is not an excuse for not doing a better job for the public.
sab
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: My husband’s grandfather went to work in the coal mines of Pennsylvania when he was 12. He left a few years later when he got too big (although he never got above 5’4″.) So he moved to Ohio to work in the factories there as a tire builder. The main lesson he learned from the mine was get that mule out safely. The mine had to buy the whole mule. They only rented the people by the hour.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: +1
Plus, government can never work properly at any level. Therefore, we shouldn’t spend money on public schools and therefore taxes can be cut and school funding should be directed elsewhere worthy, like private schools and for-profit online “institutions”.
“Government doesn’t work, and I’m here to wreck it to prove it…”
Grr…,
Scott.
jackmac
Ben Shapiro? Has he done anything significant in his life besides whine, grift and write books that quickly end up in the remainder bin at Barnes and Noble?
JustRuss
Boy do I wish you were kidding.
Regnad Kcin
@Baud: just the young bucks among them
JoyceH
Watching the news and just have to say – I don’t hang out with lawyers all the time, but I’ve had dealings with lawyers on a number of occasions… and NONE of the lawyers I’ve ever met have behaved in any way like the kind of lawyers Trump winds up with.
Ken
The Republicans have their heads so far up their, er, media bubble that they think going after Social Security and Medicare is a winner, so this really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Roger Moore
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yes, it’s costly and stupid. More importantly, though, it creates winners and losers. If you make a system that everyone benefits from, they’ll eventually decide they like getting the benefit and will want to keep the system running. If you leave some people out through means testing, they’ll resent that they’re paying in and getting nothing out and be a natural constituency for getting rid of the program.
Splitting Image
Reagan used to say that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
This has long been superceded by “I’m a conservative and I’m here to protect your children”.
Almost Retired
Alright then. Sarah Huckadickens can staff the poultry plants with Explorer Scouts.
Ihop
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: and those tiny hands can get in all sorts of places bigguns can’t.
Matt McIrvin
The “perpetual childhood” attack kind of doesn’t work when you’re talking about LITERAL ACTUAL CHILDREN.
What, you’re afraid that children are being treated like children?
cain
@gwangung: When you’re only looking at short term profits, those long term problems are just long term – in the end, they’ll just move more jobs over there.
Jay
@Almost Retired:
can’t do that. Explorer Scouts might actually find stuff that Big Poultry doesn’t want the world to know.
cain
@jackmac: Does the man even work? I mean what is his day job? For him to go around chastising others about not working…
If a Tree Falls
No free lunch for school children, but it’s perfectly okay to offer tax deductions on fancy meals with business clients. Because as we all know, it’s simply impossible to make any sort of deal without both parties shoving expensive food and drink down their gullets.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Charles Murray wrote a book where he argued that the important thing was to make the labor of fathers meaningful. If children were protected from starving by the state, their fathers’ work would become meaningless, which was what caused men to fall into anomie, crime, drug addiction, etc. (Men, specifically. It was very gendered.)
I remember David Frum reviewing this with horror–the same guy who had inspired John Holbo to speak of “Donner Party conservatism” based on similar stuff that he’d written a couple of decades earlier. Maybe Frum learned something.
Matt McIrvin
@Raoul Paste: “Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin…”
prostratedragon
@gwangung: Bah! Who ever heard of “soshul costs?” (I have heard people with ample reason to know better try to argue me out of thinking that there can be externalities.)
Elizabelle
@Almost Retired:
Works for me. It’s confusing when media refers to her as “Sanders.”
RaflW
Republicans in Iowa think 14 year olds should be able to drive and do dangerous jobs, and toil till 9pm — or 11 pm in summer! (sorry, link is muskker). But don’t you DARE ask them their preferred pronouns. They’re entirely too young, tender and impressionable to think such things!
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@JoyceH:
That’s because none of the ones you met SUCK
Bill Arnold
@Ihop:
A work acquaintance grew up on a large canola [1] farm in Canada (his parents were the farmers). He said he or maybe his brother or both were sent into combines and other equipment to clean them out or clear jams. He was not obviously joking.
[1] or maybe rapeseed, but this was Canada after the canola name was introduced
lowtechcyclist
@gwangung:
Exactly. From a purely cynical, who-gives-a-fuck-about-the-kids POV, making sure our kids are fed is an investment that pays for itself many times over.
And if you’re not a totally cynical creature, you think, who the fuck would want children to go hungry? Who would be that fucking heartless??
Crazy that it’s the party that thinks it’s on God’s side. So here’s the prophet Isaiah, speaking what they themselves believe are God’s words, clearing things up for them:
Is this what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this what I require of you as a fast:
to loose the fetters of injustice, to untie the knots of the yoke,
to snap every yoke, and free those who have been crushed?
Is it not sharing your food with the hungry,
taking the homeless poor into your house,
clothing the naked when you meet them…?
.(Isaiah 58:5-7 for anyone keeping score at home)
EarthWindFire
@Matt McIrvin: That “perpetual childhood” business made me wonder just how much time Dan McLaughin spent in elementary school. I mean, does he say this from experience?
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Roger Moore: this. Thank you for putting it this way; it really clarifies things
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: Jesus says “suffer the little children to come unto me,” so we better make ’em suffer good.
And besides, he also says “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”, so, really, we’re doing these kids a service by making sure they’re as poor as possible.
catclub
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Boeing used ferrets to pull wire in jetliners.
Freemark
@prostratedragon:
Mention ‘externalities’ to a Libertarian and you’ll just get a quizzical look. I mean dumping sewage in a river is always free and has no economic cost.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
God said it’s good to be poor, good men must not be secure,
so if we steal from you, it’s just to help you stay pure.
–“God Said,” Leonard Bernstein’s Mass
kalakal
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
And for sweeping out the chimney flues, removing all that nasty soot produced from burning the coal dug up by their peers
Juju
One thing the anti free school lunch for all students seem to be missing is that children are not stigmatized for being from a low income background. I’ve worked in schools that listed parents who hadn’t paid lunch fees in morning announcements, and listed children who’s parent/s needed to update the financial assistance information the same way. It was the kind of thing that made me want to bang my head on the desk until I passed out.
From a personal perspective, it would have been nice to have the option of a school lunch if you forgot your lunch, had an embarrassingly weird lunch that left a huge greasy spot on the lunch bag and wanted to avoid the embarrassment and had no money to buy lunch, or just wanted pizza on pizza day, but had no money for pizza day as well. I’ve had students who ate lunch in my classroom with me because they were embarrassed about what they brought for lunch. I could identify. I’ve had students with families that couldn’t afford daily lunch, but saw something wrong with getting the free lunch. They were more comfortable having their children come to school hungry. These types of situations make the child different or lesser. At school age sometimes nothing can be more embarrassing or worse. Free lunch minimizes that sort of situation.
I know I’m late to this, it’s been a long day, but I’m with Watergirl, what is wrong with those people?
I looked at that baseball guy’s Twitter thing, and he’s just an awful person up and down, side to side. Big bleh.
Nukular Biskits
@Splitting Image:
I think I’ll borrow this, if you don’t mind:
RevRick
@WaterGirl: the Dan McLaughlins of the world are fundamentally miserable people who like making others miserable. They’ve convinced themselves of their moral superiority (completely unearned, of course), thereby arrogating to themselves the right to beat others with a stick.
RevRick
@Elizabelle: Norway and UAE spells oil