The issue is that the positive externality is really hard to measure, and penny-pinching policies only care about what is easily measured, it's just another instance of the McNamara fallacy.

As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.

There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.

You shouldn't have to measure the fact that feeding children does good, and you should push back against anybody who thinks you should (because they clearly don't want all children to eat, a strong signal of fucked up morality).

This so much. My HCOL area uses a hybrid approach: kids can always eat regardless and can run up huge $$$ tabs. The parents get pestered once it gets over a few hundred.

I absolutely agree, I cannot even comprehend why there's even a discussion in the USA for not providing free hot meals for students. Running tabs, pestering parents, all of that sounds absurd for a very simple moral answer: yes, kids should have access to food in schools, no matter their wealth status. I don't even care about richer parents getting free food for their kids at school, all kids should be treated the same.

> It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.

This is an understatement. Florida's unemployment system for example was designed intentionally to fail when too many people tried to file for benefits to prevent them from having to pay out. This of course blew up into a whole scandal during covid when a bunch of people were suddenly unemployed and all tried filing at the same time which is how it officially came out that the system was designed from the start to function like this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

To make it worse, I believe that there have been incidences where people have tried to do similar (pay off school lunch debt) and the School District has refused, citing reasons from "processing overhead" to "privacy".