Why Can't America Solve the Hunger Problem?
citylab.com
citylab.com
I've worked with the very low income, and Wal-Mart (and McDonald's) are at top of their respective categories as desired jobs. Both pay better than most alternatives. Our state's Wal-Mart entry jobs pay 20% more than minimum wage.
> "pays its workers so poorly, they have to rely on food stamps and food banks to make ends meet."
Wal-Mart, by quota, hires people their diversity report calls "people of color". In 2015, 51% of people Wal-Mart hired were "people of color". At least in my state, African-Americans are six times more likely to be on food stamps. If Wal-Mart hiring matched the general population ratios, then their food stamp stats would look much more like the general population.
There are real problems in the word, but Wal-Mart's wages aren't one of them - they pay better than the alternatives. I really don't get the Wal-Mart hate.
But having helped someone fill out a job application for McDonalds, I'd personally take a programmer interview any day. That was way too many fricking questions.
Are you saying that people of color are six times more likely to be on SNAP at the same household income level, or that if Wal-Mart hired white people then they would pay them more?
The point the author wants to drive home is that the minimum wage is so low, workers can't provide for their family without supplementing it with food stamps. Because they have food stamps, Wal-Mart and alternatives keep the wages low. Food industry also profit from food stamp massively, so they have incentive to keep wages low so more workers need them and spend them here.
This is a vicious circle, that doesn't help worker escape food insecurity.
I think it is much more important to try and train/educate workers such that they aren't dependent on minimum wage jobs for their livelihoods. Then those jobs can be what they are supposed to be: entry points to the workforce that allow workers to develop skills and move on.
I feel like I would understand what the whole article means if I could unlock the mysteries of this paragraph.
Food banks as a concept don't make any sense. We already have a well-developed food distribution system: it's called grocery stores. There is no way food banks can accomplish the procurement and delivery function at lower cost than existing retail channels. That militates towards simply writing people a check with which to buy food.
There is a small subset of the population that would use that check to buy drugs or the like instead of buying food for their kids. Those people don't need food banks, they need to be assigned a social worker.
In this situation, the cold is the root cause, the medication is the corporate 'problem solution', but the medication is also perpetuating the cold by making the proper solution less attractive.
The proper solution would be to change incentives such that sick workers are allowed to, and comfortable with, taking time to let the cold clear.
Allowing soda and other "junk" food maybe isn't the best thing, and I'm sure there is some mild bed-sharing between Kraft/BigSoda and the foodbanks, but I'm also in favor of letting people spend their benefits how they choose to.
Andy Fisher also recommends a higher minimum wage, which I disagree with. It makes it harder for people to get started in a job, and also if there are a lot more people applying for $15 jobs than there are jobs, it opens the likelyhood that discrimination will take place.
Economists are kinda uncertain about this though: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/15-minimum-wage The conclusion seems to be "$15 isn't that high of a wage so it won't distort the market that much."
Hunger isn't a solved problem in the United States, and it's either because the food banks aren't doing a good enough job, the corporations are too cozy with the "anti-hunger complex", the government isn't doing a good enough job, income inequality is too high, or because the public thinks that that food drives do more good than they actually do.
I'm first in line to point out that things in reality have complicated causes, but I have to agree that this is all over the board and if I put on my manager's hat, I don't think any group comes away with any actionable items from it.
The USA has an obesity crisis and the overwhelming majority of the population is fat, obese, or morbidly obese. Is that hunger? Or is that from poverty? Or something else?
They may be feeling hungry, or have cravings, or have some other side effect of destroying a bodies ability to handle insulin, much like a drug addict feels cravings for their drug, but is that hunger? Or just a side effect of abusing food like any other vice or intoxicant?
I'd imagine where hunger is real elsewhere in the world, and people are genuinely starving, lacking food, and otherwise malnourished, they'd find this type of discussion in the fattest country on earth to be offensive.
Maybe, yes. It's easy for someone with an ample supply of cheap, crappy food to have both a calorie surplus and a nutrient deficit. These people are absolutely "malnourished" even if they're obese, and are a significant burden on the public health system. Food security is not just about access to adequate calories, it's about access to nutritious foods, to foods that make people feel full without eating to excess, etc. But vegetables are dramatically more expensive than soda per calorie.
That's a poor measure of comparison. Vegetarians are healthy and easily survive without a problem on vegetables only (and calorie wise 50% or far less of what the "daily recommended intake" often is) whereas nobody is going to survive on soda alone.
I hear this often, but it is much more expensive per meal to buy prepackaged garbage food, microwaveable meals, junk etc, than visiting the vegetable section along with bulk rice or beans, and meat. The difference is the latter requires 20-30 minutes of cooking and some minimal effort, whereas microwaving the package garbage meal takes 2 minutes.
Not everyone likes to cook, and many people don't want to deal with cooking after they're tired from a day at work, but it's not really about affordability until you're approaching organic foods.
About 1/8 of the country experiences food insecurity.
So there is plenty of room for the majority of the food insecure to not be obese. I'm not making a claim either way, just pointing out that there is lots of room for that explanation in the statistics; further information required.
"The hunger problem" is clearly someone else's problem, but what would be America's problem? Something about competing with other countries in various aspects of power, while mainaining and servicing its internal power structure, probably.
How relevant is feeding people to that?
It doesn't generate shareholder value. Unless you're a grocery store or food producer whose customers are subsidized by food stamps or similar programs.
Feeding people also reduces the risk of a revolution (whether peaceful or violent) forcibly changing our power structures.
We the resources to end hunger in America. The massive reduction in workforce dedicated to agriculture is evidence of that. The problem is that "or you'll starve" is a highly effective tool to coerce economic rents out of people, so efforts reducing the amount of hunger just means that rentiers can squeeze more out of those barely making it.
Hunger is not a problem for capitalists, it's a solution.
(The article seems more about the network of interests that have grown up to profit off the determination of America to not solve hunger while paying lip service to the ideal of doing so, but that's not the root of the failure tomsolve hunger.)
This was the stat I was curious about. But it is generally underwhelming.. Should 1 person working in a household really expect to be able to feed, house, and clothe everyone? And if 40% of people on food stamps don't have jobs.. that seems like a much more obvious starting point. They are potentially capable* of working, but are not. Why is that?
*barring mental illness, disability, etc. Which is another issue I think could be solved sooner than rebuilding the entire food welfare system.
hunger problem => food insecurity
where "food insecurity" is not the same thing as starving, or getting enough calories in a day to survive (although it can include severe lack of food.) Food insecurity can be more about not being able to afford balanced meals, or not getting enough to eat some of the time.
I recommend the linked report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2015: https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=797...
I also canvassed in Des Moines, Iowa in 2008 for a presidential candidate who was _not_ in favor of farm subsidies, and was especially against corn-ethanol subsidies. It, surprisingly, didn't come up that much?
You can keep people from going hungry by doing that, but it doesn't address the underlying problem and in fact it likely perpetuates it.
No more fish.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/november8/ocean-110806.ht...
superiority.
So, why can't America solve the hunger problem? Because there are some who want to be superior to others. The end. The main value of being a "have" is not being a "have not". So if you give things to the "have nots", then you've undermined the "haves" (the distance between them has decreased)
>But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
It's also worth noting that Obamacare was originally a republican idea but since it was associated with Obama, they hate it.
No, the “mandate and subsidy” thing was originally an insurance industry idea, floated arond the time of Bill Clinton's healthcare reform efforts as what they would rather see.
Republican politicians later picked it up, but it didn't come from them. (And by the time the ACA was being floated, those Republicans who still supported a mandate plus subsidy approach wanted it limited to HDHP + HSA plans, which had become a major Republican idea during the Bush Administration, where mandatory at-risk personal investment accounts—not only HSAs, but also, for example, similar accounts as a replacement for all or part of Social Security—were a recurring theme in Republican policy proposals.)
And if you take tabeth's argument to it's conclusion--- anyone who makes money is just trying to be a greedy sociopath and wants to push down their fellow man. Which is think is trivially false.
And to quote your HN profile-- "if you're going to claim something, please cite!" I've gotta turn that around and apply it to your "all social problems stem from a single word: superiority." claim.
2. Your assertion "anyone who makes more than average is greedy" is your own opinion and claim.
3. "saying that humans are essentially always guilty of coveting" is also your own claim, and one that I did not make.
In summary, it seems you're projecting some things you believe onto me.
Your last portion is well taken, though. Unfortunately for such a grand claim like the one I made, there (practically) can't be a study that irrefutably proves it. However, most of the modern social issues are inherently ones of superiority, including:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Agism
Arguably any act that harms anyone else is an act of "superiority." For you must believe your ideology or yourself to be superior in order to invoke it. When there are options there will be comparison, and when there's comparison there must be superiority as there's judgment. To judge is only human.
Buuuuuuut you posted in a thread about _Hunger_. Hunger comes from poverty-- you're right that income inequality is maybe the wrong word for it, I was taking it a step farther. But from the context, it did feel like you were trying to say the poverty comes from people enacting superiority. And #2 and #3 are my trying to derive other moral positions your that assertion-- so let's put them to the side.
But cool, I'm glad we came to a closer understanding. I thought you were taking the common anti-capitalist position that "all businesses are evil!" or something.
Sure we are not thought this in the west. Remember "history is written by the victors"?
I'd say it is "oppression".
The sad part is that I recall when at one operation I worked at people didn't want the fresh stuff when we got it. Sadly, I think they are addicted to the processed garbage.
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
Yet another argument for raising the minimum wage in the short term and moving to basic income in the medium-to-long term. The current system boils down to company scrip with added obfuscation.
I do agree with the last sentence of your first paragraph though. Walmart benefits MUCH more from non-employee SNAP beneficiaries than it could ever save in employee wages. And it's not just the SNAP dollars it redeems. Every earned dollar not spent on food (because of SNAP) is a dollar that same person could spend on clothing or other goods sold at Walmart.
>Yet another argument for raising the minimum wage
Raising the minimum wage harms the lowest skilled and most poorly educated workers. If your productivity warrants $10/hr but the minimum wage is $15/hr, you're simply unemployed. First we provide poor people with abhorrent schooling in our failing public school system, denying them the skills they need to get a decent job, and then we require employers prejudice against these same vulnerable workers. Sure, the workers on the margins of being worth $15/hr get a boost, but everyone under them on the economic ladder is harmed until inflation catches up and washes out the raise.
Actually economists are uncertain about that. It's not as simple as you make it seem.
That assumes that your productivity is absolute and not relative. And productivity is always relative. In other words, what makes a company viable is the cost structure of its competitors. If competitors are local than a minimum wage rise has little effect on employment. If competitors are international than a local minimum wage rise has a major effect.
The vast majority of minimum wage jobs in the States are in service industries with local competitors.
Why should it be the responsibility of businesses that require low skill workers to pay above market wages as a form of social welfare instead of having the government handle it using taxes collected from everyone?
(Note: I don't feel qualified to argue this point but its the common response and there is lots of evidence of improved social welfare in places with higher minimum wages)