Comprehensively repugnant party.
The #PartyOfReagan, true to form -- punching down on lower-income families.

#GOPathetic #HouseBudget #FreeSchoolLunches #CommunityEligibilityProvision #CEP

https://newrepublic.com/post/173668/republicans-declare-banning-universal-free-school-meals-2024-priority

abstract from "School Food Policy Affects Everyone: Retail Responses to the National School Lunch Program" by #JessieHandbury & #SarahMoshary in #NBER:

"We study the private market response to the National School Lunch Program, documenting economically meaningful spillovers to non-recipients. We focus on the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), an expansion of the lunch program under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Under the CEP, participating schools offer free lunch to all students. We leverage both the staggered roll-out and eligibility criterion for the CEP, which is limited to schools where at least 40% of students participate in other means-tested welfare programs. We find that local adoption of the CEP causes households with children to reduce their grocery purchases, leading to a 10% decline in grocery sales at large retail chains. Retailers respond with chain-level price adjustments: chains with the most exposure lower prices by 2.5% across all outlets in the years following adoption, so that the program's welfare benefits propagate spatially. Using a stylized model of grocery demand, we estimate that, by 2016, the indirect benefit had reduced grocery costs for the median household by approximately 4.5%."

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29384/w29384.pdf

#SchoolLunch #CEP #GroceryCosts #retailers #groceries #WorkingPaper #CommunityEligibilityProvision #NationalBureauOfEconomicResearch