2017 Mar 19^th

Mick Mulvaney is on a mission: He is desperately trying to justify the cuts to social service programs in the Trump budget. His talking points are well rehearsed and are used again and again when he is interviewed. He begins by plaintively asking how we can ask a single mom with two kids to support a school lunch program that isn’t working anyway. He says he has no problem requesting her financial support for, say a wall on our southern border, or generous retirement pay for retired flag officers like Lt. General Flynn. This tree-star retiree violated the law against retired military officers working for foreign governments. Flynn’s lobbying group got over 530 thousand dollars from Turkey for representing them while he was Trump’s National Security Advisor. Will Mulvaney explain to this hypothetical mom why her tax dollars should support this guy? I doubt it.

As to the school lunch program, aside from the obvious (apparently to all except Mulvaney) value of feeding hungry kids, Mulvaney hasn’t looked very carefully at the program’s effectiveness. If you’ve already decided to defund a program why would you try to find anything of value the program does? Mulvaney, the typical politician, is true to form.

A 2014 Center for Disease Control report on health and academic achievement, for example, found that students' dietary behavior has a direct effect on school success, and that when students receive breakfast at school through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) School Breakfast Program, they see "increased academic grades and standardized test scores, reduced absenteeism, and improved cognitive performance." On the other hand, researchers have found that skipping breakfast (or not having access to breakfast in the first place) has been linked to "decreased cognitive performance (e.g., alertness, attention, memory, processing of complex visual display, problem solving) among students." And students who come to school hungry are also more likely to receive lower grades overall, be absent from school more often, are more likely to fail or repeat a grade, and have greater trouble focusing. Well if Mick Mulvaney refuses to look, Mick Mulvaney will never find.

How about the “Meals on Wheels”? Mulvaney insisted that this was not a federal program at all, that the state’s administer the program and its continuation was up to them. Well, not exactly: The funding comes through the Administration for Community Living, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services that serves the elderly and disabled. That agency has a $227 million line item for "home-delivered nutrition services."

Those programs are authorized though the Older Americans Act, a law so popular that its renewal passed Congress last year without any recorded opposition. And while Trump didn't single out that specific program, Health and Human Services will receive a 16% across-the-board cut.

If meals on wheels is eliminated what happens to the people who depend on it? Without this service, many of them will no longer be able to live in their own homes and they will have to move into nursing homes costing at least several thousand dollars a month. The cost will soon exhaust their savings, then what? Then the government will pick up a much greater tab than they would have had meals on wheels been left in place. This is the thinking of s shrewd businessman?