But why?

I’m pretty fiscally conservative myself, but I think this is a step too far. We require kids to be at school, and most kids don’t get to choose what kind of meals their families provide, so the least we should do is provide healthy meals for lunch. It’s not expensive at all either.

In my area, we had a small tax cut of like 0.10% or something, when that would’ve been enough to fully fund student lunches (from some back of the napkin math). So instead of cutting taxes, we could’ve ensured that every kid had access to at least one healthy(ish) meal.

What they should be fighting for isn’t cutting school services, but increasing school choice. If I don’t like the meal options, teachers, etc at one school, I should be able to change without losing those tax dollars. That doesn’t really cost anything, and it tends to force public schools to improve as well. Cutting school lunches just saves a small amount of cash, which isn’t going to impact anything WRT the budget. If we want to narrow deficit spending, we should be looking elsewhere, such as:

• legalizing (federal level) and taxing (at the state level) recreational marijuana - would significantly reduce arrests and incarceration (huge enforcement savings), increase tax revenues, and improve family cohesion for those in poverty
• eliminating/consolidating federal agencies
• increase IRS funding and simply taxes - IRS more than pays for itself, and simplifying taxes means the IRS can do its job more efficiently
• increase SS income tax cap, and reduce benefits for the wealthy

And so on. But no, we need to cut school lunches for whatever reason.