NPR. This is the indicator from Play-Dup Money, I'm Darren Woods.

And I'm Whelan Wong.

Darian, if you couldn't already tell from the smell of sharpened number two pencils in the

air, it's back to school season.

I was wondering what that smell was.

And one aspect of US educational policy

has become a particular flashpoint

in the presidential election cycle,

school meals and which students should get to eat for free.

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walls made school meals free as governor of Minnesota.

He touted this policy in his speech last week at the Democratic National Convention.

So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.

Meanwhile a group of House Republicans wants to get rid of an Obama era program

that allows universal access to free meals in low-income school districts.

So school meals are political, to say the least.

But you can't really dig into school meals

without a big serving of our favorite topic, economics.

It's a school food fight at the government policy level.

Today on the show, we explore an important question

at the heart of the economic debate about feeding students.

What helps low-income children more?

Paying just for their meals or paying for everyone's meals. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes managing your money in different

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