Taki's Mag

There’s currently a guilt-inducing ad campaign on the NYC subway featuring a large cup of coffee next to rows and rows of sandwiches: “For the price of one latte,” it says, “you could provide 25 school lunches.” Your first instinct as a non-poor person is to think, “What a piece of shit I am, drinking this coffee and taking food out of starving children’s mouths.” Then you take a step back and do the math. “Wait a minute,” you say to yourself, “a month of sandwiches only costs a cup of coffee? Why did these people have a kid if they can’t put aside a coffee cup’s worth of money a month in order to feed them?”

The ad is referring to Bloomberg’s school-lunch subsidy at a quarter per meal. In September 2008, Bloomberg joined hands with Harry Truman’s corpse and decided that all public-school kids deserved a free lunch. Who could argue with that? It works well at his financial headquarters. The mayor’s relentless ego keeps reminding us that the city is its own nation and he is our president. He even told some students at MIT a couple of nights ago that the NYPD is his own personal army. So why not take over as the city’s mommy?

His policy is simple: Poor kids get free lunches at school, slightly poor people have to pay a quarter, and the cream of the working class can get lunch for $1.50. This nanny-state plan has been an abject failure, as many parents have gone for a third option: Forget about filling out the qualification forms and simply grab a free lunch. This has left the taxpayer to foot a dine-and-dash bill that hit $7 million last year and left the mayor no choice but to suggest canceling the program with scary threats such as, “We want to keep this between the families and the schools and we don’t want to use collection agencies.” Another glaringly obvious problem with his idiotic plan is that most parents aren’t even bothering to use it possibly because, as his own news agency reports, the meals aren’t even that healthy.

None of this should even be an issue, because if there’s one thing that’s cheaper than food, it’s good food. I had no idea sandwiches were so cheap until Bloomberg’s ad accidentally spelled it all out. Upon a bit of research, it appears even charging $1.50 for lunch is rich.

• A loaf of bread is about $2 in America and usually contains 24 slices, which can be 12 sandwiches if you’re cool with crusts (and if you’re starving, you should be).
• A jar of peanut butter is about $3 and provides 12 sandwiches.
• A jar of jelly is about $3 and provides at least 12 sandwiches.
• Water is free.

That’s $2 + $3 + $3 = $8 for a dozen sandwiches, or $0.67 per sandwich. If you want to really live the life of Riley, replace the PB&J with butter and ham, and the price swells to a whopping $1 per sandwich. Thanks, calculator. Now I can enjoy my coffee in peace.

What parent can’t scrape together three quarters a day? A bum can gather enough change to buy 12 oz. of vodka, but you can’t get it together to create a sandwich for your child? Judging by the size of the moms’ asses at my daughter’s public school, these women are hardly starving. I would be stunned if one of them didn’t have an equally large TV. So why is it the taxpayer’s job to provide New York’s 1.1 million public-school students with lunch? The New York Department of Education’s budget is $24 billion a year. That’s $21k per student or, if the number of students per classroom remains in the low 20s, about a half-million dollars per classroom.

This is one of those deal-breakers that leads Republicans and Democrats to an impasse. The left is totally incapable of crunching the numbers because doing so inevitably pins some culpability on impoverished (and most likely single) mothers. When they hear “free-lunch program,” they think of Dorothea Lange’s iconic image of Dust Bowl poverty. The problem with such romanticism is that it creates policies begging to be abused. The millions of dollars in unpaid lunch fees prove this isn’t about the system helping the poor. It’s about New Yorkers taking advantage of a patronizing policy some asshole billionaire dreamed up to feel better about himself. As was made painfully clear in the Atlantic Yards project, what’s good for the billionaire goose isn’t necessarily good for the hundredaire gander.