Wednesday, May 29, 2002

We've just suggested (immediately below) that "compassionate conservatism" might be characterized by "the fear that somebody, somewhere, might be getting a free lunch." In a tangentially related story, our local paper ran a two-parter this weekend "investigating" the possibility that (better sit down for this one) some of the kids who lunch under the auspices of the Federal free lunch program may not actually come from families with qualifyingly-low incomes.  That is, they might be getting free lunches for which they don't really "qualify."  The (supposed) fault in the system is that the preparation, collection and analysis of the paperwork used to "qualify" a family is so burdensome that some parents simply don't fill it out, and some schools don't demand it too forcefully, or scruitinize it too closely. Once again, we must ask ourselves what the ultimate goal of the free lunch system is.  If the purpose of the program is to limit its own costs, and to reduce as practical the possibility that an "unqualified" kid might eat for free, then by all means let's crack down on those fraudulent claimants. If, on the other hand, the ultimate purpose of the program is to ensure, as much as is practical, that every kid in every school is adequately nourished for every afternoon's schoolwork, then let's ask how to promote that goal as effectively as possible. The reality is that a hungry brain is a dumb brain.  If a kid goes to class inadequately or improperly nourished, that kid is not going to learn.  Worse, in failing to learn, that kid's brain is not going to "stretch" and develop the neural pathways that enable later learning and thinking.  Not only is a hungry brain today a dumb brain today, but a today's hungry brain will be a dumber brain a decade from now. In our view, the "free lunch" program is not a matter of compassion or societal generosity: it isn't state-sponsored charity, something the government gets us to pay for out of the (legally compelled) goodness of our hearts.  Instead, it's a matter of sheer pragmatism.  Today's well-fed, smart, learning-enabled kids will become the productive workers and effective consumers of twenty and thirty years from now.  Today's malnourished, learning-impaired-by-low-blood-sugar kids will become the welfare recipients and prison inmates of the future.  The "free lunch" is not a giveaway -- it's an investment. So we say: free lunches for all comers.  No "qualifying" paperwork.  The only thing a kid has to do to get lunch is to walk into the cafeteria.  The cost?  Somewhere between $3 billion and $6 billion a year if every single school child were to take advantage of the program.  Sounds like a lot of money (especially since it's an ongoing cost, rather than a one-time charge), until we compare it to some other costs, like the $50 billion (or more!) per year spent on criminal justice corrections costs. 6:30:39 AM

We're glad we're not the only ones who noticed: The repoliticized welfare debate, put in play by the White House, ignores the purpose of welfare policy, which should be to help the poorest families earn enough to lift more children above the poverty line. By Peter Edelman. [New York Times: Opinion] In one of our very infrequent exposures to TV, we happened to catch, last Saturday, several Presidential sound-bites on the "success" of the 1996 welfare reform.  Again and again, Shrub cited the reduction in numbers of people "on welfare," and the number of former welfare recipients now holding full-time jobs.  Numbers that he didn't cite were statistics on child poverty rates, overall poverty rates, rates of malnutrition among children, and other measures of what some of us (including Peter Edelman, obviously) thought were the real purpose behind both the original welfare programs and their "reformed" flavors. Oddly, Bush could have cited poverty-rate and malnutrition-rate statistics and would have sounded just as upbeat.  He'd have to have been a little selective in his choice of statistics (or, rather, his speechwriters would have), since the news is not uniformly positive.  Nevertheless, it does appear that poverty rates have dropped measurably, albeit not dramatically, in the six years since welfare "reform" was passed.  However, it's clear that Shrub and his fellow "compassionate conservatives" don't see the lifting-up of the bottom tier of our society as the true purpose of "welfare" or its "reform" -- instead, the purpose of reform is to PUT THE BUMS TO WORK. Shrub's Pappy once famously complained about a "puritanism" which consisted of the fear that "somebody, somewhere, might be having fun."  One suspects that the parallel construction for "compassionate conservatism" might be something like this: "the fear that somebody, somewhere, might be getting a free lunch."  Molly would remind us that Shrub was Guvner of Texas when that great state declined to publicize a 100%-federally-funded Medicaid benefit, targetted at improving the health of young children, for fear that people who realized that they qualified for that program might look further and discover that there were State benefits programs for which they also qualified. 5:29:02 AM