Thanks to taxpayers, there is a free lunch for some

So is New Hampshire now the “Eat Free or Die” state?

You’ve probably heard about the Canaan, N.H., cafeteria worker allegedly fired, as international celebrity chef Jose Andres put it in a tweet, “for giving food to student who couldn’t pay . ... The hero is Bonnie Kimball!”

Maybe, maybe not.

After a week of being denounced in the media as heartless Scrooges who fling starving children out of the lunch line for begging, “More gruel?” the food service company she worked for is fighting back. It released a statement Monday disputing her claim that she was fired simply for letting a kid without any money in his account go through the lunch line.

They say the real story is that this kid had been going through Kimball’s line for three months without being charged, and “now that there’s a change in staff, this student’s account shows regular activity.”

Who’s telling the truth? Who knows — but I found Kimball’s story difficult to believe from the beginning, because this is America 2019: Nobody gets in trouble for giving other people’s stuff away. The real trouble starts when you ask people to pay their own way.

First of all, everything you need to know about how good life is in America today is that the possibility of one kid not getting his lunch is enough to launch a media frenzy. You know what they call “your kid doesn’t eat lunch today” in Venezuela?

A day that ends in “y.” Second, the source of the outrage isn’t in the details of this incident, but in the idea that someone, somewhere might be held responsible for not paying their bills. We’re so horrified by it that we’ve even invented a name for it: “lunch shaming.”

Really. And it’s illegal in three states, and a bill to ban it in Massachusetts has already been proposed.

The premise is that if your parents don’t pay for your lunch, there must be no consequences — zero — for you. No alternate meals (as in the New Hampshire case), nobody turned away, nothing.

And as a result, public school systems across America are dealing with the problem of being forced to eat millions of dollars in unpaid lunch bills left by deadbeat parents. Because despite what you’re hearing from the 2020 Democratic candidates, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Note we’re not talking about “poor parents” — we’ve got them covered already. A family of four earning $47,000 or less already qualifies for free or reduced lunches thanks to the $13.6 billion we spend every year on school food programs.

We’re talking people who could pay but have figured out they don’t have to. Just last week, Warwick, R.I., announced it was going to start giving kids with unpaid lunch bills sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches. Why? Because this small school system had $77,000 in unpaid “free lunch” debt.

Last year, Framingham got stuck with about $80,000. Across the U.S., about 75% of all schools have unpaid “free lunch” bills every year, ranging from a few dollars to one school with an $856,000 (!) balance last year.

But when schools try to impose some commonsense consequences on kids whose parents won’t pay, suburban moms hie themselves to the fainting couch in horror.

How is it fair to all the parents who work hard and pay their kids’ bills to let their neighbors — some who earn more than they do — scam their way through? It’s the same as the amnesty-for-illegals movement. Can’t you see what an insult this is to the responsible immigrants who’ve done it the right way?

Believe it or not, the response of the “free lunch” leftists is to argue that the real problem is letting people pay for their own lunches in the first place. Some kids get mystery meat while others dine at the pizza and salad bar? Why it’s an outrage! This lunchroom inequality must end! Every student should get “free lunch” — presumably the same, egalitarian lunch, featuring recipes straight from the “Bernie Sanders’ Breadline Cookbook.”

Which, by the way, only has one recipe: sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches.