Massachusetts passed a 4% millionaire's tax last year. Now public school students are getting lunch

https://www.yahoo.com/news/massachusetts-passed-4-millionaires-tax-172447869.html

Massachusetts passed a 4% millionaire's tax last year. Now every public school student is going to get free lunch.

1.9k
Kenneth Niemeyer
Sun, August 13, 2023 at 1:24 PM EDT



About $1 billion gathered from the new Massachusetts income tax will be used to provide all public school students in the state with free school breakfast and lunch.Mara Auster/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images

• Massachusetts passed a 4% tax on people who make more than $1 million per year.
  
  
• Revenue from the new income tax is being used to give kids in the state free lunch and breakfast at school.
  
  
• Massachusetts is the eighth state to start free lunches since a pandemic-era federal program expired.
  

Students in Massachusetts will get free lunch and breakfast at school thanks to a new 4% tax put on people who earn more than $1 million.

Massachusetts voters passed a constitutional amendment that went into effect at the beginning of 2023 to put an additional 4% state income tax on people who make more than $1 million per year.

 

I hope it doesn't cause a severe outflow of millionaires, to neighbouring states without a special tax. Not all millionaires, but definitely some, can be like that. I suppose it's understandable, in one way. Many millionaires are charitable people, but outside those gifts, it's hard to become or stay a millionaire unless you're strongly motivated to hold on to what you have... I think it's a tricky thing to mess with. But...

I hope the very wealthy learn to live with the tax and it accomplishes its purpose. It helps kids - what's more needed than that?

 

So, rich people are required to pay something to help the community? HOW DARE THEY! That is communism and UN-AMERICAN!!!!

 

6% and they could have had dinner at Ruth's Chris, too. Oh, well....

 

Right, Just like universal single-payer health care.

 

Two questions:

How many kids there got free lunch prior to the tax?

What is the quality of the food?

 

You'd have to look at pre-2020 numbers to see how many students qualified for the free lunch program then. The numbers don't change that much, generally speaking.

As for quality, it's school lunch. Free or paid, it sucks. But at least the kids get to eat SOMETHING.

 

Depending on the state, it's not always easy to qualify; especially for the working poor. Also, it's one more form to fill out and thing to worry about. It's easy to overlook when you're an overwhelmed parent. Unless everyone is getting lunch for free.

As a kid who had to eat the dry PB sandwich for lunch (and no milk or sides) for lunch when adults made mistakes, I fully support kids being allowed to eat what their peers are eating.

 

And who is the supplier?

 

Offering it to all the kids, instead of just those too poor to afford to buy lunch, eliminated the shaming that used to happen, perpetrated by kids as well as adults.

Before universal lunch programs, kids were often placed in separate cafeteria lines, or given colored tickets and other identifiers, making them targets for shaming/bullying for being poor. Kids protected themselves by avoiding the cafeteria altogether, defeating the purpose of the program (and resulting in lots of wasted food).

Some lunch programs operated on a debit/credit system, where parents would get a bill for meals consumed by their children. There were stories some years ago about parents so deep in unaffordable "lunch debt" that schools refused to allow their kids to eat anymore. These were working parents, often middle class, who started the year okay, but then something bad happened that upended their personal finance situation.

Also, middle-class status in the USA is a tentative membership category. All it takes is one cancer diagnosis, one car accident, and the family is bankrupted--eventually having little or no resources to provide the necessities, including utilities, housing, or food for growing children. Making free school lunch universal helped eliminate incentives for other kids, and teachers and other staff , to humiliate the child in the devastated family.

BTW, the humiliation from teachers and staff does not have to be intentional, and it usually is not. The colored tickets and special lines were for efficiency and not designed to harm anyone, but that was often their effect; an unintended consequence.

 

All true. Universal free lunch does some good. Universal single-payer health care would eliminate MANY financial catastrophes associated with "One cancer diagnosis," "One car accident," etc. The diagnosis or the accident are bad enough -- without the financial consequences of huge medical bills. But single-payer means the dreaded "socialism," right? smh

The politics have to look right - so who cares about the people? Leave them to the piranhas - the insurance companies. Or to nothing.

 

I wonder how much money is wasted and abused in that state, I simply don't know but if they reserve to tax the wealthy in order to provide school lunches who knonws.
I'm glad the kids have lunch and breakfast.
When families have hard time, this really helps and prevents kids from going hungry, some have this as the only meal that day.

 

This is how it worked at my school. The kids on the free lunch program were supposed to have something like unlimited credit - not that you could get multiple meals per day. Unfortunately, when I was in elementary school, the system glitched a lot. Being a kid, I'm not entirely sure what happened, but more than once I was randomly deemed to have no money and had to eat the "emergency" lunch (PB sandwich; not even sure it had jelly). I've never even liked PB that much in the first place, but it's pretty bad on the dry whole wheat bread the school used.

I think once was parental fault: a specific form wasn't returned on time or something. The other times, though, were just the system glitching and being unintentionally cruel to the kids who just wanted lunch.

 

I remember that with the debit/credit systems, every year--usually around Christmas--wealthy individuals around the USA would come to the rescue and pay off the lunch debts for all the kids in a school so that by the time school was in session in January, all accounts were reset to zero. This would sometimes amount to tens of thousands of dollars for one school. I think I recall once the "Daddy Warbucks" paid off the lunch debts for an entire (small) school district.

I also recall a truly reprehensible case, where a struggling single mother with 3 kids had around $4000 in debt that had been carried over from year to year. At that point the school refused food to her kids. After a brief public discussion in the news media (which shamed the school as well as the mom and her kids), a wealthy individual paid off her debt so her children could eat lunch.

 

Doing that to kids is terrible. I was going to say something like "Ain't that America" (John Mellencamp) ... until I discovered that here in Canada we just don't have school lunch programs -- but we will. Here's the plan: (Google)

"Among G7 countries, Canada is the only one without a national school food program. (emphasis mine - J.) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an election commitment in 2021 of investing $1-billion over five years, and tasked his agriculture minister and minister of families, children and social development to build a school food policy."

No K-8 school I knew of in the city had a cafeteria at all. Kids mostly went home - some brown-bagged and ate in the classrom if it rained, snowed or froze. In good weather - outside. In high school - a cash-on-the barrelhead cafeteria - teachers could also buy the food and take it on a tray to the teachers' room(s). No money? You knew not to get in line. MANY kids brown-bagged. From homes of all income strata.

For 40 cents you could get a meat pie, gravy, some peas and mashed potatoes. For around a quarter you could get a sandwich. Pie was also a quarter, I think. Oh yeah - a bag of chips was a dime. It's a wonder I wasn't up to 300 pounds by graduation! Back then male and female students had separate cafeterias! In the Catholic system, entire schools were separate - e.g. Cathedral High - Boys and Cathedral High - Girls - some blocks away. Although neither of their parents was Catholic, my sons went to a co-ed Catholic High School, so that separation is long gone. Later, they both married girls from Italian families. Tanti auguri, figli miei!

 

I was one of those shamed kids. Thank goodness for subsidized (but not free) lunches, Medicaid, welfare, and food stamps, because all of that saved me. I've tried to pay America back; I hope we're square.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/senate-democrats-introduce-bill-cancel-174040895.html

"A group of Senate Democrats have introduced a bill that would wipe out student meal debt for kids across the United States.

Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), introduced the “School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act” last week.

Fetterman said there are more than 30 million kids in the U.S. who can’t afford school meals and that the national public school meal debt is $262 million a year.

“‘School lunch debt’ is a term so absurd that it shouldn’t even exist,” Fetterman said in a press release on Monday. “That’s why I’m proud to introduce this bill to cancel the nation’s student meal debt and stop humiliating kids and penalizing hunger.”

The new bill would erase student lunch debt by directing the Department of Agriculture to pay for all debts owed to schools for lunch and breakfast programs.

The child poverty rate more than doubled last year, while the average household income declined, according to 2023 Census data.

There are currently eight states with a permanent universal meal program. The states are Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, Michigan and New Mexico."

 

Reminds me that one Daddy Warbucks was initially not allowed to pay off school lunch debt before the school flip-flopped (while threatening kids with lunch debt about being removed to foster care): https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/us/pennsylvania-lunch-debt-offer-trnd/index.html