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“SCHOOL LUNCHES” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E520 on March 6, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SCHOOL LUNCHES
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HON. DOUG BEREUTER
of nebraska
in the house of representatives
Monday, March 6, 1995
Mr. BEREUTER. Mr. Speaker, this Member highly commends to his colleagues this editorial which appeared in the Omaha World-Hearld on March 2, 1995.
GOP Would Keep School Lunches and Let States Run the Program
The notion was spread that Republicans in Congress are about to snatch school lunches from the mouths of hungry kids.
It's not going to happen. It hasn't even been proposed. Such talk is part of a gross misunderstanding, orchestrated by critics of a GOP plan that would transfer the school nutrition program from the federal government to the states.
Nobody is proposing that the school lunch program be eliminated. Nobody is recommending that low-income kids be denied free lunches. Certainly nobody is urging that less be spent to keep poor children properly fed--and therefore attentive--during the school day.
Neither does the issue have anything to do with shutting down the cafeteria lines. Some Republicans merely believe that the states can feed the kids more efficiently and bring the program's runaway costs under control. Those Republicans may well be right.
Critics say that states have a poor record in providing social services. Some states have indeed done poorly, although the critics sometimes have to reach back to Mississippi or Alabama in the 1950s or 60's to illustrate their contention. Times have changed. No good reason exists that Governors Nelson, Branstad and Romer and their colleagues shouldn't have the opportunity to show whether they can run the lunch program more efficiently and compassionately than the federal government has run it.
If the states revert to the behavior of a Mississippi in the 1950s, of course, Congress should take another look. But nothing suggests that they would do that.
Unfortunately, the GOP plan has been widely misrepresented. President Clinton said it threatens the interests of children. Ellen Goodman, a Boston Globe columnist, made it sound monstrous when she wrote that the country ``is simply not too broke to feed poor schoolchildren,'' Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., called it despicable and declared that children would go hungry if it passed. An Agriculture Department official said decades of progress in good nutrition were about to be reversed.
Such overheated rhetoric.
Sponsors of the proposal deny that spending would be cut at all. In 1994, the federal appropriation was $4.3 billion, with the states adding funds of their own. The GOP plan would allocate block grants of $6.78 billion next year, rising to
$7.8 billion in 2000. That's not a cut. But critics have another way of measuring things. They note that earlier projections were $5 billion to $7 billion higher over the five-year period. That much will be needed, they contend, to meet population growth and inflation.
Whether the projects reflect genuine need, however, is debatable. Most beneficiaries in the school lunch program are kids from middle-income and upper-income families. They receive subsidized meals even though they are deceptively told that they pay ``full price.'' In the language of the school-lunch bureaucracy, ``full-price'' means that the government is paying only 32 cents of the total instead of the $1.90 it pays for low-income kids.
Under the Republican plan, there would be no subsidies for the rich and middle-income lunchers. But that hardly constitutes forcing children to go hungry. Since when did the government have the right to use the tax of low-income and middle-income people to subsidize families who live in
$400,000 houses and earn $300,000 a year?
Other critics of the GOP plan stress the welfare aspect. They talk about the lunches as a way of fighting hunger among kids who may have no alternative to the subsidized meals they receive at school. Some of the critics say the number of needy kids is certain to grow in the next few years.
Suppose they are right. It would provide further vindication for the Republican approach, under which middle-income families and rich families would pay their own way to free more funds for the needy. That isn't a bad thing. Certainly it would constitute the dreadful assault on defenseless children that critics have so deceptively accused the Republicans of proposing.
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