(Steven Singer, a veteran National Board-certified teacher, author of Gadfly on the Wall blog, Quotes on image above from Mashable)
The Trump Administration would like you to agree that it’s a great idea to shave $90 million dollars off the federal budget by taking free lunches away from a half a million “food insecure” kids. They don’t care that one in six children live with hunger in America today, and how hunger makes it harder for kids to learn and makes them sicker, both as kids and as adults. Adequate nutrition is so tied to kids’ academic success, studies have shown that end-of-grade reading and math tests vary depending on how much time has elapsed since the family’s SNAP (food stamps) benefit arrived, with scores peaking between two and three weeks after benefits were received. And now the GOP wants to take that support away. For $90 million dollars. How much is $90 million dollars anyway? Is it enough to risk the futures of a half million kids?
- It’s about $20 million dollars LESS than the approximately $110,000,000 dollars Trump has cost taxpayers for his golf weekends…so far…
- It’s about $30 million dollars LESS than the $120,000,000 taxpayers were billed for Melania’s extended stay in New York after the 2016 election. (Why didn’t the billionaire head of the party of “personal responsibility” pay for this family matter himself?)
- Here’s a graph for us visual learners to understand the pettiness of this proposal: