"Poverty in America"... mostly rhetoric

Yeah and aluminum USED to be a precious metal, now we drink soda out of cans made of the stuff.

Just because you can fetch a decent meal at a soup kitchen, or a high calorie cheap meal off a dollar menu. Just because you can get designer clothes from a discount/thrift store at very cheap prices. And just because you can get a flat screen, game system or decent appliance for a fraction of a weeks worth of minimum wage, does not mean you are immune from the psychological, physiological, and emotional stresses of poverty.

Are there fraudulent situations that occur, of course, it's called humanity every institution them humans touch has fraud somewhere. But just to dismiss the entire poor community cause of household junk is intellectually dishonest at best, and coldhearted cruelty at worst.

 

Thanx for the posting.

One line of that video sums up this entire thread from the OP's first post.

"As the rich get richer, the poor get richer!"

Basically almost NONE of our 14.3% "impoverished" Americans are hurting. They just have less than they WANT. MORE than they've EARNED, but less than they WANT. But their WANT is not strong enough to actually WORK for what they WANT.

 

Ok. Let's put aside the morals and ethics of poverty for a moment. What about solving poverty simply for the sake of ending our War on Poverty, which we have been paying for, for over thirty years, ostensibly, to be more fiscally responsible?

 

A Laudable Goal, but these guys don't want to broach the subject on that level

Unfortunately "Solving Poverty" might hurt their bottom line
& most certainly would Rock the Boat of their cast in stone Ideology

IT MIGHT $cOST THEM SOMETHING


We cannot but look aghast at the IGNORANCE of some of these people

Their cherry picked Stats have been Debunked a few times
………...................................................……. on this thread

I think they must have the ears on the either side of the Rock
they use for a Brain, Stuffed with the Ideology that Justifies
…....…......................…their so called Capitalist FreeMarket

……...............................… That being Unsustainable GREED



They would do well to try and live on Min Wage for a ½ yr.

It would I am sure
be an informative exercise for these cloistered Fundamentalists

Nickel and Dimed from The American Ruling Class!

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDgFiW2xtf0"]Nickel and Dimed from The American Ruling Class! - YouTube[/ame]



​

 

Heritage Foundation on Hunger:
Let Them Eat Broccoli

http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/12/heritage-foundation-hunger-let-them-eat-broccoli

Part I

While most Americans were planning for the annual ritual of overconsumption known as Thanksgiving, the good folks at the Heritage Foundation, America’s leading architects of conservative thought for at least three decades, were doing their part to add to the holiday cheer. According to a November 13 Heritage article, well-off revelers could stuff their faces unhampered by guilt about the less fortunate, because there are no longer any hungry people in the United States.

You have to hand it to Heritage for always being first out of the gate to exploit the latest event or finding to advance its aims—this is the same think tank that issued a comprehensive strategy, two weeks after Katrina hit shore, for using the hurricane as an excuse to slash federal social programs. This time, its thinkers found inspiration in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on Household Food Security in the United States, which is as close as the federal government comes to providing statistics on hunger among the nation’s poor. The latest report states that 11 percent of Americans were "food insecure" for some part of 2006, and 4 percent—11.1 million people—experienced "very low food security."

These Orwellian euphemisms are a triumph for the conservative agenda; the USDA altered its terminology last year on the recommendations of an "expert panel" convened back in 2003. "Very low food security," for example, used to be "food insecurity with hunger." The experts asked the department to eliminate "hunger," which, they argued, "should refer to a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness, or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation." To some, that might better describe starvation, but the panel's reasoning wouldn't be a stretch for the Bush administration, which claims "torture" must entail pain "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

But the Heritage folks are looking beyond semantic tweaks: Far from having too little to eat, they argue, poor people are eating too much. By the time the USDA report went public, Heritage had readied its own salvo, titled "Hunger Hysteria: Examining Food Security and Obesity in America." In recent years, the U.S. media and public have become increasingly obsessed with the "obesity epidemic." And what better way to attack the idea of deprivation among the poor than to note that they are getting fatter? Rightly or not, people still associate obesity with the sins of gluttony and sloth, which jibes nicely with the concept that welfare recipients are lazy people who would rather feed at the public trough than get an honest job.

"Hunger Hysteria" is the work of Robert Rector, Heritage's senior domestic-policy man and a main proponent of welfare "reform." He argues that while the USDA's numbers might sound "ominous" on the surface, "the government's own data show that the overwhelming majority of food insecure adults are, like most adult Americans, overweight or obese." While "they may have brief episodes of reduced food intake, most adults in food insecure households actually consume too much, not too little food."

His next step is to attack proposals that would give the poor more cash for food “despite the fact that most...already eat too much." More food money, he suggests, will only make them fatter. Instead, Rector says, they ought to be encouraged to "avoid chronic overconsumption of calories" and to simply "spread their food intake more evenly over the course of each month to avoid episodic shortfalls."

Rector goes on to attack common "misconceptions," such as the argument that "poor people become obese because they are forced, due to lack of financial resources, to eat too many junk foods that are high in fat and added sugar." Junk foods, he counters, aren't particularly cheap—for example, Coke and Pepsi cost more than milk. "Snack foods such as potato chips and donuts [sic] cost two to five times more per calorie than healthier staples such as beans, rice and pasta." In other words, if the poor want to eat junk food and get fat, fine, but let’s not finance such behavior. The solution, Rector argues, resorting to the perennial trope, isn’t a more-equitable society or expanded social programs, but greater "personal responsibility" on the part of poor people.

 

Heritage Foundation on Hunger:
Let Them Eat Broccoli

Part II

There's another side of the story, of course, that addresses realities Heritage and its followers choose to ignore. Adam Drewnowski, professor of epidemiology and director of the University of Washington's Center for Obesity Research, believes diet is determined by economic and social factors far more than by personal choice. "Healthier diets are more expensive," he says flatly. It's easy to point to specific exceptions like doughnuts vs. beans or Coke vs. milk (well, not always; my local Safeway charges 40 cents more for a half-gallon of milk than for a two-liter bottle of Coke). But research generally has shown that "energy-dense foods," which often are high in refined grains and added sugar and fat, "provide dietary energy at a far lower cost than do lean meats, fish, fresh vegetables, and fruit," as Drewnowski wrote in a 2004 article for Nutrition Today. Processed foods also dominate store shelves in poor neighborhoods, are quick to prepare, and simply taste better to some people than some nutritious foods available on the cheap—think cabbage, condensed milk, and canned fish.

Drewnowski calls Rector's arguments "rubbish, written from a position of class privilege—let them eat broccoli, indeed." He cites the suggestion that the poor should purchase cheap, nutritious foods rather than processed stuff. "When you suggest that people buy rice, pasta, and beans," he says, "you presuppose that they have resources for capital investment for future meals"—since these healthy staples come in large bags—"a kitchen, pots, pans, utensils, gas, electricity, a refrigerator, a home with rent paid, the time to cook. Those healthy rice and beans can take hours; another class bias is that poor people's time is worthless. So this is all about resources that middle-class people take so much for granted that they do not give them another thought. Not everybody has them."

On the other hand, he says, "buying a doughnut for dinner does not involve any of those middle-class resources. You pay 55 cents for this meal only and there you are. Yes, rice would be cheaper if only people had the time and were not working two jobs on minimum wage."

The Food Research and Action Center, a D.C. public interest advocacy group, seconds Drewnowski’s findings in a position paper: "One factor that may contribute to the coexistence of obesity and food insecurity is the need for low-income families to stretch their food money as far as possible. Without adequate resources for food, families must make decisions to maximize the number of calories they can buy so that their members do not suffer from frequent hunger."

The situation is likely to worsen, since rising food costs have outpaced inflation. According to the Department of Labor, prices rose more in the first half of 2007 than in all of 2006. If this continues, 2007 will mark the largest annual increase in food costs (7.5 percent) since 1980. Nutritious foods are even harder to afford; a study by Adam Drewnowski and Pablo Monsivais just published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association shows that prices for the healthiest foods have ballooned nearly 20 percent in the past two years, while those for fatty and sugary fare have actually decreased a bit.

Against this backdrop, the safety net of food stamps and other social-welfare programs continues to shrink. Since the Reagan years, Washington has been dominated by New Victorian attitudes championed by neoconservative doyenne Gertrude Himmelfarb—wife of Irving Kristol and mother of William—who in her writings seems to yearn for the days of nineteenth-century Britain, when "every measure of poor relief...had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor." Reaganites worked hard to trade the entitlement programs of the despised New Deal and War on Poverty for the tough love of faith-based charity, where a prayer could get you a bowl of soup.

Democrats bought into a version that was only nominally kinder and gentler. In the 1990s they signed on to President Bill Clinton’s famous welfare-reform bill—the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996”—suggesting that the causes and the solution to poverty lay with the poor themselves. At times these pious and punitive ideologies have taken a more inventive, supposedly scientific turn, hiding behind statistics and the seemingly disinterested policymaking of such things as risk-benefit analysis. But they have seldom been seriously challenged by either party.

Indeed, President Bush appears determined to cut funding to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. The program, which provides healthy foods, nutrition counseling, and healthcare referrals to some 8.5 million low-income pregnant and post-partum women and children under five, heretofore has had bipartisan backing in both Republican and Democratic governments and has been considered quite effective. But Bush has threatened to veto the 2007 farm bill unless cuts are made to discretionary spending, including WIC. If Bush prevails, local WIC centers will have little choice but to turn women away, putting some on a waiting list and cutting others from the rolls—more than 500,000 mothers and young children would be dropped from the program.

The fate of food stamps is also tied to the farm bill. "Cuts Congress enacted in 1996 are shrinking the value of food stamps more with each passing year, making it increasingly difficult for millions of poor families to afford a healthy diet," says Robert Greenstein, director of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Right now, food stamps average only about $1 per person per meal, well short of what these families need."

The House has passed a version of the bill with measures to help food stamps keep pace with inflation, but the legislation—problematic in many other ways—is stalled on the Senate floor. "The single biggest thing we can do to improve the diets of food-stamp families," Greenstein says, "is to raise their food purchasing power so they can afford more nutritious foods instead of having to rely on cheap high-calorie, low-nutrient foods."

This is the context in which Heritage is attacking better funding for food stamps and other nutrition programs for the poorest Americans. Instead of having well-off taxpayers feel for poor people in New York or Los Angeles trying to survive on a buck a meal, the organization has them think about all those fat people they saw last time they drove through a low-income neighborhood with the windows rolled up. But even the comfortable may not remain forever distant from the realities of hunger in America. Of the food supplies and resources middle-class people take for granted, Adam Drewnowski remarks, "Given the current economic situation, many people may not have them for much longer."

 

Poverty in the US , or Globally , is not rhetoric , and quite frankly to suggest otherwise is ludicrous .

Anyone that espouses otherwise is showing a remarkable lack of common sense and you really need to take the blinders off of your narrow view and take a drive out and look under a few bridges ...

The people you see there are what is left of the middle class of America , and they didn't ask for their jobs to be sent to China ...

and that's all I'm gonna say for now on this subject...

 

Is there a point in there?

What does that have to do with anything?

If you are buying flat screens and game systems and have disposable income spare me the claims of poverty, you have no idea what real poverty is.

 

You need to go drive through "poor" neighborhoods and look at all the nail salons and place to rent fancy wheels for you car and liquor stores. Look at all the people with fancy smart phones, $100 tennis shoes and designer cloths. Look at the new vehicles sitting in driveways and satellite dishes.

What we deem as poverty in this country is a joke.

 

They have the refigerators and freezers and microwaves and fancy cars to go get the food and the time on their hands to cook it.

 

.

A Fact neatly IGNORED & never mentioned by these Blanks
The Heritage Foundation – Myopic – Void of common Sense

They will believe anything in order to maintain the Absurd Stereotypes
.................that sustain their Atavistic self destructive World View

.

A Joke not appreciated by those unable to cope with MinWage

A Joke enjoyed by those who feel the need to Maintain their IGNORANCE
With their Projections of just these sorts of Vile Stereotypes


Let those here, who consider themselves Intelligent enough, do the simple arithmetc, do the Math

How do these people afford all the Luxuries supposed by these Stereotypes ?
While UnEmployed or on a Min Wage Job - DO THE MATH - Do not be so
...................................................................................... STUPID

.

.

 

Poverty in the USA is the subject. Not poverty anywhere else in the world.

And poverty in the USA is described as those making less than $22,800 dollars with 4 people in the household.

You suggestion about "looking under bridges," refers to the Homeless, not the pseudo-impoverished. Most of which own homes.

The Homeless living under bridges are mostly fellow veterans suffering some form of PTSD. And most are eligible to receive up to $3000,00 per month in VA benefits. But there is no way to communicate that to their ruined minds.

The people in poverty in the USA are the ones wearing the Tommy Hilfiger Logo clothes and texting on their smart phone, sitting in their Caddy Escalade with the $8000, dollars worth of tires and spinner wheels..

 

Shew, I am glad we solved that. Thanks Dan.

To be so entirely dismissive toward the homeless as a part of the poverty equation leads me to think you are either completely unaware, lying to yourself, out of touch, or all three.

Back in the 1980s the New York Times (I know you hate them) literally went looking for the welfare queen in the Cadillac Reagan spoke of, and found not a single one, even in a crappy caddy. Again there may be some fraud, that is the nature of humanity, but there are folks that need and deservedly receive that help, probably most of the folks on it.

 

I did not "DISMISS" The Homeless. I am far better connected to the homeless than you could hope to be. I am well aware that the bulk of the actual homeless are veterans like myself. And I know that, There but for the grace,,,,,,," go I.

Meanwhile you dismiss the typical welfare leech that I described as though they did not exist. You know they do, I know they do, and the NY Times knows they do. But it doesn't fit the agenda of the Times or your agenda to acknowledge that they do. And my agenda is the fiscal solvency of the USA. It is not Republican or Democrat. Altho much more conservative and not a bit liberal.
I willingly put my life on the line for this nation and I WILL NOT allow it to collapse due to liberal stupidity.

 

From: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/526/homeless-facts.html
40% of homeless males are veterans, 34% of adult males overall are veterans.

Not the majority, not the bulk, but yes a significant number to be sure.

BTW I repair medical equipment mostly for the vets served VA medical center, including homeless ones, so I am aware of the plight of veterans.

That said skim that stuff in the link, if only to bone up on your "better connection to the homeless than I could hope to be".

 

I do not use info from conservative sites nor credit any info from liberal sites.
PBS is near ULTRA liberal and therefore ALL statements by PBS are considered LIES.

The connection to veterans? I know what got them they way they are. I was there, twice, volunteered both times. And I'm proud of it if you're interested. And I spent long weeks in the hospital with them. Replacing the toner in the copy machine is not quite the same as experiencing the massive fear of a fire fight, or the random killing and maiming by mortars and rockets.
Judy!

 

Well, said! Thank the gods for a human being who has enough empathy and common sense to see that nobody (anywhere) chooses to be poor. Respect!

 

If you challenge a statistic, you can't just say lies, you must cite source that has conflicting numbers.

AND IF YOU READ THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE it says the numbers on the homeless are hard to peg down exactly... but continue being proud that MOST homeless (in your estimation) are veterans have fun with that.

 

Fine Judy, don't forget you wrench when fixing the shatter.

 

Bluesguy , I don't know where you're at , but I can tell you this much , what you have said in your post to me is absolute Bull Crap ... and that's putting it mildly ... you've been listening to Rush Limbaugh too much , it's frazzed your brain ... it's scrambled your reality of what is real and what is poooofffyyyypooop ...

and that's all the time I'm gonna waste on your comments..

 

Nope , can't agree with you on that either , sorry , wish I could , but you're way off the mark in your post , and if I might add , I believe that you need to put your GOP propaganda down and take that look under the bridges again , this time with open eyes and an open heart ...

Let me know when you get back , ok ?

 

If you refuse to deal in reality so be it, but when the poor can afford to rent fancy spinner wheels for their cars it shows me they have disposable income and they should have no claim on the money of someone who gets up and goes to work each day. When they have money to go get fancy nail jobs then they prove they are not poor and have money to blow.

 

First, IF you knew what you are babbling about you'd know that it is not my "opinion."

"And poverty in the USA is described as those making less than $22,800 dollars with 4 people in the household."

That is the official US Govt description of poverty in the USA. Different sizes of households have different income amounts.
The family of 4 is the commonly used one.

If a family of 4 makes $23,000.00 they, OFFICIALLY" are not 'impoverished.'

And the HOMELESS in the USA are about the only ones that would be actually impoverished which by dictionary definition is not having the ability or means to feed, cloth, and shelter themselves. Other than the homeless would be those disabled for whatever reason.

All those I have no problem supporting.

You are the one taking great license LUMPING the "poor" together when you include those living in a house, with color TV's and OVERSTUFFED kids [and that is official research, NOT my opinion] with those living with fogged minds under a bridge.

And you claim that I'm wrong about the clothes, phones and cars? If you believe that your flatly blind to the world around you. It not only does happen, it is the norm.

And you don't agree with me? GREAT. When ideologically blinded, liberal idiots don't agree with me, I'm on the right track.

 

LMAO renting spinning rims.

 

At least we agree on some people needing help. I suppose at issue is where the line is drawn over who needs help.

My opinion is at some point failed outcomes are going to be a drag on society overall, and helping prevent failed outcomes is better and cheaper than dealing with failed outcomes after the fact through penal/imprisonment. Wether the prevention is through after school programs, school lunches/breakfasts, WIC, even welfare for a mother so she can be there for her children.

Fighting poverty is not about the generation receiving the aid, it is all about the next generation allowed a better quality of life, and a better chance to become a productive member of society than leaving those folks to their own devices.