Speaker 1: Hey, get a load of this one. So North Dakota's Senate recently passed a bill to increase
the amount of money that state employees can collect for meals while they're traveling on
the job. Raised it from $35 to $45 a day. And this is a benefit that lawmakers, of course,
will be able to enjoy as they are state employees themselves. So it's a nice little perk that
they've passed for themselves. And in a vacuum, I really want to see a big issue over this. The
bill is going to cost taxpayers $1,000,000 over the next two years, and it's now waiting for the
governor's signature to become law. Now, $45 a day for food may sound like a lot. Sure. But you
have to consider that if you're traveling, you're not really going to be able to cook.
You're going to be eating out exclusively or almost exclusively. So you think, okay, well,
$10 for breakfast, $15 maybe for lunch, 20 bucks for dinner. That adds up to 45. Okay. I think
this makes sense. However, here is the rub. Less than two weeks ago, the Senate in North Dakota
rejected a separate bill that would have provided $6 million over the next two years to give free
school lunches to all K through 12 students living at or below 200% of the federal poverty
level. The bill failed by a single vote, with 13 Republicans voting against it, despite how they
backed this recent bill about reimbursement for state employees. Not surprisingly, the Democrats,
of course, backed the free school lunch bill. The rejected school lunch bill aims to expand on
an existing federal program that already provides meals to students living below 130% of the poverty
level. We're hearing some reactions from North the North Dakota lawmakers about this, including
Senate Minority Leader Cathy Hogan, who's a Democrat. She criticized the Senate for voting for
more free food for themselves while rejecting the bill to provide food to hungry children. However,
we're also hearing from Republicans like Assistant Majority Leader Jerry Kline, who claims that
he failed to see any correlation between the two bills, which is laughable in my opinion,
because they both literally have to do with paying for meals for people. One group of people being
state officials and the other a group of people being students and then get a load of this one.
State Senator Mike Obama, Bama cited personal responsibility for why kids shouldn't get
free meals and blames negligent parents for the problem. Yes, a lack of personal responsibility
among what? Kindergartners, first graders, second graders. I mean, how does that make
any sense whatsoever? Real galaxy brained take there. North Dakota has the second highest child
poverty rate in the U.S. to put this in context. And over 30% of its K through 12 students qualify
for free or reduced price lunches. So this state, more than almost every other state in the union,
is in need of a bill like this because we know the importance of providing lunches to kids. It, of
course, ensures that they're going to have access to adequate nutrition regardless of their ability
to pay. It will increase academic performance for kids because it helps them focus on what they're
learning in class instead of focusing on their stomach rumbling. It helps with their development
as they're, of course, still growing, and it reduces stigma too. I remember when I was growing
up in school, we had these yellow lunch tickets. If you were paying full price for the lunch, the
full $3.50 or whatever it was. But there were also students who had the reduced price lunch tickets,
and those were a different color. Or maybe it was orange, I don't exactly remember. And there
was also the free lunch tickets, which I think were maybe red. And so other students would see
students pay with the yellow tickets or the red tickets. The green tickets, and everyone would
kind of have an assessment as to the financial situation of the families of all these different
kids. And, you know, if you're one of the students who are paying with the discounted or free lunch
tickets, there could easily be some stigma there. Right? There could be some self-esteem
issues that results from that, some mental health troubles that result from that. And so in my mind,
we should just do away with this altogether. School lunches already incredibly subsidized,
and it's something that we as a nation can easily afford. The pandemic era federal aid made the
school meals available for free to all public school students. That ended on September 30th
of last year. However, it's unfortunate that we were not able to keep this thing going and make
it permanent one of the longer lasting results of the pandemic. That would have been nice to see to
just set this in stone and not go back on it. But unfortunately, we are regressing on this issue and
leaving it up to the states has not worked because we're seeing what transpired here in North Dakota.
And it really is too bad, especially seeing the contradiction that we're seeing with them,
totally fine approving, increasing the cost that they're able to spend when it comes to meals for
themselves, but not when it comes to. Students in the most disadvantaged among us. All right.
That's going to do it for this segment of the David Pakman show. But stick around, because we
have one more segment to go. We'll be back with much more right after this commercial break.