Another Blinding Flash of the Obvious

Sitting here reading through the various news items this morning while waiting for the phone call to start my unemployment hearing and I came across an article talking about how the Bush administration wants to reduce the number of people taking advantage of the free/reduced school lunch program. My position is that if the family doesn't qualify, they don't qualify. The rules are in place for a reason. The administration is simple talking about having some sort of a verification mechanism. Maybe even something like if you get food stamps, you automatically qualify for free lunch. For people truly in need, this would make life even easier.

But advocates for the poor are opposed to the idea. Why? Because "advocates for the poor accuse the department of inflating the number of ineligibles to come up with new criteria that will result in removing children from the program." OK, the administration was claiming 27% of the recipients of free or reduced lunches didn't qualify. Others have said that that number is too high, but they agree that the problem is significant. No one propsed new criteria, only verification of the existing information that is collected.

Nobody has disagreed that too many unqualified kids are getting a free or reduced lunch. The idea of verification is to reduce the amount of money spent unnecessarily (maybe as much as $1.8 billion last year). The only way to reduce that amount is to remove the families that don't qualify. It looks like the advocate quoted above has realized that verification would weed out unqualified families and they believe that to be absolutely wrong as it would reduce the number of familes in the program.

I love it when the socialists screw up the redistribution of wealth. Hasn't anybody told them that your supposed to steal from rich to give to the poor if you're a socialist? Only the lawyers are supposed to steal from the rich to give to other rich.