This is where you and I will disagree. I don’t want poor people paying for shit I can get myself without issue. That seems very unfair.
Save that money for a useful social program that helps poorer people
It costs money to operate registers, take payments, etc as well.
Means testing is terrible and why waste time and money rather than cooking the kids some food and having them focus on learning?
Not every aspect of society should be about running some type of business. The whole thing is a distraction from what school ought to be about.
The same goes for medicine, btw. The means testing and insurance gating there is even worse. Take the cash registers and insurance middlemen out of it and suddenly doctors can worry about the patient care instead of payments.
Perhaps. But what if it worked out vastly cheaper to target free lunches. Let’s say a billion was freed up for some important social program to help poor people. Would you agree with me if that were the case?
Means testing also makes it easier for the rich to target programs for removal because not everyone qualifies for them.
We all need food, water, and sometimes medical care in order to survive. We all deserve even more, such as vision care, dental, and mental health support, and educational and training programs. Housing should even be a right. We have means tested versions of programs for some of these things, and people of meager means often slip through the cracks because they didn’t fill out the right paperwork or weren’t considered quite poor enough. It’s a shitty system and it starts with people coming from your viewpoint.
If a rich kid actually wants to go to for instance a free city college, who cares? Most people that have the means to go elsewhere would, and ultimately the goal of these institutions is the good societal impact that you want. If rich people are going to free colleges or eating free meals or taking public transit, it means the quality is there, which is great for everyone.
