Last week, Blanche Lincoln painted herself as a hero for poor kids, introducing a "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act" that would increase funding for school lunches. Of course, given that it's Lincoln we're talking about, turns out the proposal isn't all warm and fuzzies.
In his budget proposal earlier this year, Obama called for an additional $10 billion for school lunches over ten years, or $1 billion per year. Currently, we spend about $11 billion annually on school lunches -- less than a month's worth of military spending. At that level, school administrators typically have less than a dollar a day to spend on ingredients for each lunch they serve. To see what such a miserly outlay means for the nation's public-school kids, see Ed Bruske's great recent series of posts; or check in on the Fed Up blog, which features snapshots of the daily offerings at a school in Illinois. Or revisit the infamous "pink slime" scandal.
Obama's proposed increase would boost the current daily per-lunch outlay by less than 20 cents -- not enough to buy an extra apple a day for every kid.
Now Blanche Lincoln (D.-Ark), the agribiz-friendly chair of the Senate Ag committee, has come out with her draft of the School Lunch Reauthorization Act. She may be calling it the "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act," but what she proposes doing is slashing Obama's proposed increase by more than half, to $4.5 billion over ten years.
If Obama can't spare an extra two dimes per day per kid to spend on ingredients, Lincoln won't even fork over a single extra dime. If Obama's proposal wouldn't even net an extra apple a day, Lincoln's would have trouble procuring a single stick of gum -- not that school kids need any more sugar.
And it gets worse. Because of Congress' "pay-as-you-go" rules, Lincoln has to balance her modest increase with cuts in other agricultural spending. Naturally, she has chosen to target conservation, hunger, and even other school-lunch programs -- leaving commodity payments, beloved of her state's large-scale cotton farmers, intact. According to the ag news service DTN (quoted by Farm Policy blog):
Lincoln, D-Ark., said the bill would pay for the increased funding for the meals programs through a $2.2 billion shift in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which would slow immediate spending but index it to inflation in the future, a $1 billion reduction in USDA purchases of commodities for school meal programs, and a $1.2 billion reduction in the food stamp nutrition education program.
Lincoln's own family benefits hugely from federal ag subsidies, to the tune of $715,000 between 1995 and 2005. No way she impacts those subsidies. Therefore, she "pays" for "increased" spending for school lunches by moving school lunch money from one pot to another, all while slashing Obama's already-lacking proposal.
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