Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders want to bring woke socialism to the school cafeteria

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar aren’t content with pushing “Medicare for all” and the “Green New Deal.” Now, they want to bring their socialist schemes to your child’s school cafeteria.

“Today would be a good day to make school meals universal,” Omar tweeted on Tuesday. In doing so, the congresswoman renewed her push for legislation, co-sponsored with Sanders and dozens of other liberal lawmakers, to make taxpayers fund “free” school lunches for every student in America.

“In the richest country in the world, it is an outrage that millions of children struggle with hunger every day,” Sanders argued. “Every child deserves a quality education free of hunger … I am proud to introduce this legislation.”

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Agriculture has actually expanded free school lunch to all students but on a temporary basis due to the pandemic. Liberal lawmakers want to make the scheme permanent.

And they start from a premise that’s completely uncontroversial. Of course, no one wants children to “struggle with hunger,” and everybody agrees that children “deserve a quality education free of hunger.” But the socialist-leaning legislators go beyond these obvious truisms and quickly stumble into factually misleading and morally dubious territory.

Hearing their description of the status quo, one would forget that school lunch is already heavily subsidized and incredibly cheap. According to SchoolNutrition.org, the average price of a school lunch nationwide was between $2.50 and $2.75 as of the 2016-2017 school year — significantly less than the $3.81 production cost per lunch served.

Meanwhile, all students from families at or below 130% of the poverty-defining income level are already eligible for completely “free” lunch. Plus, any student at or below 185% of the poverty-defining income level is already eligible for reduced-price lunches: just 40 cents per meal.

So, despite what Omar’s and Sanders’s rhetoric would imply, the existing infrastructure already more than adequately ensures that school lunches are affordable and accessible for students from low-income families.

As a result, forcing taxpayers to pick up the tab for “free” lunches for the rest of the student population would mostly benefit students whose families can easily afford to pay for their meals already. Proponents try to claim the high ground, but this is morally wrong. Why should working-class taxpayers have to shell out more to the IRS so that upper-class parents don’t have to pay $2.50 for their child’s lunch?

Another downside of this plan worth mentioning is that it would shovel more money and power into a government-run food system that is notoriously incompetent — remember the pseudoscientific “Food Pyramid”? — and wasteful. And ultimately, the costs are borne by taxpayers.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously quipped that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The free market scholar didn’t mean this literally, of course, and was referring to all forms of “free,” aka taxpayer-financed, government giveaways. But as it turns out, the observation is just as apt if taken literally and applied to, well, lunch.

Socialist plans to give “free” school lunch to all would really mean higher taxes on all of us just to pay for the meals of children from middle- and upper-income families. Interestingly, other “progressive” proposals such as forcing taxpayers to pay off student debt would also disproportionately benefit the middle and upper class.

This gap between rhetoric and reality is a pattern for Omar, Sanders, and their peers, and their “free lunch” proposal is no exception. Just like so many other socialist schemes, big government would actually be used to pad the pockets of the well-off at the expense of the little guy.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.