The National School
Lunch program that provides healthy free or reduced meals for children in need
has joined Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as yet another program
Republicans want to gut in 2017.
Not only do Republicans want to take Social
Security away from the American people and take away healthcare for adults and
children alike, they apparently also want to let children starve at school,
too.
For years, both parties supported the school lunch program, but
Republicans have becomes so greedy and heartless that they are breaking that
spirit of cooperation in order to ruthlessly take food out of the mouths of the
children who need it most.
The program currently costs $12.7 billion, which is a drop in
the bucket considering Donald Trump just called for expanding America’s nuclear
weapons stockpile, which will cost way more than a school lunch.
Clearly, Trump nor the Republicans have ever heard President Dwight Eisenhower’s Chance
for Peace speech calling excess military spending a theft from the American
people.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . .
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Indeed, while Republicans are only too happy to increase
military spending way beyond our needs, they are more than willing to sacrifice
the care of the American people to do it.
Low income families rely on the school lunch program to make
sure their kids have something good to eat during the day. Eating well helps
children learn better and develop healthy eating habits.
But Republican don’t care.
Republicans are targeting the school lunch program because they
claim the kids aren’t eating the food because it’s too healthy. They also claim
that the program “risks becoming insolvent,” which is bullshit because Congress
funds the program.
Also, while there are always complaints when change occurs, experts
agree that schools are adapting and number of complaints have dropped.
According to Huffington Post,
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the GOP attack on the program was “out of touch with the progress that’s been made” improving school lunches.
Wootan acknowledged there were well-founded complaints about the program’s stricter standards, but the gripes have declined as schools have adapted. She described Freedom Caucus opposition as “purely political anti-government sentiment” that upends the program’s historical support from both parties.
Indeed, it appears Republicans only want to gut the program
because Michelle Obama made it her focus over the last eight years to improve
the nutritional value of school lunches.
In other words, Republicans are being petty because they hate President
Obama and the First Lady.
In fact, food waste in America’s schools has always been a
problem but a study in 2014 published by the American Journal of Preventative
Medicine found that the new meal standards ushered in by Michelle Obama did
make food waste worse.
So Republicans are attacking the program for no real reason and
are apparently willing to hurt the well-being and health of children if it
means hurting Michelle Obama.