My first response to this was: tell me you live in America without telling me you live in America. Anyone know if that's fair or if other nations have similar issues?

Reading this article, I thought of how I've been volunteering to help low income folks do their taxes for free through Tax Help New Mexico... and how after a few years I realized that the American tax system is set up to 1) allow tax prep companies to make billions 2) make Americans resent their government 3) allow the wealthy to get away with not paying their fair share. Yes the system is unfair and insane, but we are able to alleviate the burden on the few people we help. That's worth a few Saturdays in the spring.

We did a gofundme around Christmas 2023 for our kids elementary school’s lunch debt. We needed about $1200 and raised $1800 in about 3 days.

It's a tragedy that this has to happen. None-the-less it is always inspiring and always a great reminder that it is easy to help. A Seattleite named Jeffrey Lew did this in Washington state in 2017. More info here and here.

This is trickle up economics. As the oligarchs take more, those of us with less are encountering more fundraising pleas to make up for the government’s lack of humanity. This is especially egregious in medical cases, where normal working/middle class people can’t pay for lifesaving treatments and associated hospital bills, nor support themselves if their recovery will keep them out of work for an extended period. It’s great that we do this for friends, loved ones, and even strangers, but it’s absolutely shameful that it falls on us to do so. And in many cases, the money is used to pay off debt owed to billion dollar companies. Ugh.

This story reminded me of this Vox piece from 2019: Beware of the feel-good news story. "Begging for sick days and walking 20 miles to work are not tales of inspiration. They are societal failures." The lunch debt article does the right thing in highlighting the societal failure right off the bat and throughout.

Here's a list of states where kids are never shamed. Proud to be in CA where we did it first (but still insanely late by any realistic moral standard). All of our local elementary schools still provide breakfast and lunch during the summer and over breaks to kids who would like to come by and eat. It's hard to describe how good it is for parents, even those like me who can afford to buy or pack lunch. It means we don't have to pack a lunch, fight about what's in a lunchbox, take the time to worry about if what we're packing meets up to some imagined standard... Nope. Kid goes to school. Eats the lunch that is there. It's a real reduction in our parental time tax.