this is not really /n/ material but the answer is that a lot of kids never developed neurologically due to malnutrition, drugs, neglect, and so on
this will get much worse now that the fashionable thing to do, politically, is to "teach poor people a lesson" by cancelling various social programs. there are critical points in childhood development that can't be redone later in life. so even if the marginal gain is like a couple of hundred kids per state, you could save many future dollars of social harm and police/incarceration funds just by creating mechanisms for broke people to never be without food
http://people.tamu.edu/~abarr/AB_AS_FoodStamps_Crime_6_18_2019.pdf>The induced reductions in violent crime translate to large external benefits for society.These types of future external benefits are frequently ignored in discussions of the value of
social safety net programs; instead, debate focuses on the contemporaneous equity-efficiency
tradeoff. We find that even under conservative assumptions, the social savings from crime
reduction alone outweigh the cost of the program, and likely any inefficiencies generated by
the program, during its early years
