Photos Show the Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
How can such a large proportion of people be so financially insecure that a couple of weeks unemployment means that they are going hungry in the wealthiest country in the world?
It happens, because America has not been about the American people for decades. America is mostly focused on the destruction of sovereign states it finds guilty of being un-American in style.
Did everyone just suddenly forget that this is the country that has spent more on destroying sovereign states around the world, in the last 50 years, than any other country in the history of the world?
If taxes are lower and hence less money is spent on social support, that has nothing to do with the military.
Still I don’t think that applies much to the USA - I think the total tax burden is comparable in many states. Medica* and SS are also huge parts of the budget.
And yeah, it's fucking insane. But it's also how people want to live, it would seem. It's hard not to look at the voting patterns in the USA and conclude that certain areas do this intentionally.
Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure, but we sure could make housing cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
and
https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/
Is it that the median figures hide a lot of people earning less and paying more rent? That is, inequality is the problem rather than the averages.
> Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure,
Surely a lot of the low paid workers are in service industries; how are they subject to global pressure? It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
Health care insurance for example can eat a good chunk of that 3.6kUSD: the average cost of individual health insurance premiums is $440 for an individual and &1,168 for a family, in 2018 according to eHealth [1]
1: https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/individual-and-fa...
Ouch!
That makes health insurance behave like a very regressive tax.
In contrast in Germany where they have compulsory insurance it is only 7.6% to 15% of your salary, so something between USD 273 and USD 540 for a family. See https://www.sympat.me/germany-healthcare-insurance/.
>>It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap Vietnamese labour.
You'd be surprised, teachers are being imported from the Philippines, lots of migrant labor, service workers are often undocumented, so this depresses wages, of course there's also H1Bs and who knows how many other types of work visas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/05/arizona-teac...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
Covid-19 is going to strip bare all the niceties that allowed the other 60% of Americans to be oblivious to the financial frailty of the 40%. The next years will be very, very difficult for the country.
And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
While that's certainly holds true for some metro areas, it's certainly not a rule for sprawling US cities built for cars. Opting out of car ownership limits your employment options, social mobility, and so on.
Most people do not have the money to purchase a car outright, even the cheap several thousand dollar ones.
Therefore they rent or lease, and hope this specific scenario never happens.
and get this: they clean them too.
Many Americans make awful decisions around their cars. We had this thread five months ago:
Borrowers Are Going Underwater on Car Loans (wsj.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505748A lot of people were being made fun of for not taking 0% loans in order to purchase cars: "it's free money!", they were told, "you'd be stupid not to take free money". It turns out those 0% loans had other hidden costs that many people were not aware of (like the costs of you not being able to service debt once your revenues go to zero).
I agree with you, but the problem is that the bankers aren’t telling this to people and have become over-reliant on subprime consumer debt like this. Uber launched a lease-to-buy program for their drivers so they could nicer cars on the road and then didn’t uphold their promise to attract more riders to Uber Black. Consumers are getting preyed upon so hard in the US and we act like it’s just business and poor people are dumb for a reason.
> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
This is such an invalid statement for most Americans, and it’s deeply condescending to boot. There’s simply no viable alternative to car ownership for most Americans, period. If you have (or had) a job that required any sort of commute and you don’t live in a handful of cities with first class public transit (which are pretty much all in the northeast), you could spend up to 2-3 hours commuting each way every day using public transit. That’s just a non-starter for most. Even tech cities like Austin and SF have poor transit options compared to Europe.
Where are all of the high-end cars in these pics? Most look like standard makes and models to me.
And considering that the increase in demand here is exclusively people who had a job until the bottom fell out on the economy, shouldn’t the whole rationale for requiring people to waste time and go through this exercise of very visible shaming be re-evaluated?
As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. That idea was never a good fit with changing unemployment numbers, and these days it’s plainly visible that all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts incapable of holding down a job. So why continue humiliating them?
If I had no food, I'd be certain to get in a queue regardless of the "image" it presented. Priorities!
Shame is a powerful emotion. It might be related to me being European that I believe in sparing people such experiences (“dignity” is a big concept here), the stigma itself might be proportionally stronger in the US. Death of a Salesman is all about that, IIRC, and considered a cornerstone of Americana.
I remember Death of a Salesman being about how the father carried on away from home and his son found out, and how he killed himself over the shame of it and how it affected his son. I thought it was more about the repercussions of his selfish actions than being purely about the emotions that he himself felt. If anything, the father was not a figure to be emulated.
In these sad situations, it is clear that there is a flotilla of other individuals who are also sadly in the same situation, so it isn't a "shame" queue that the "non shamed" observers can stand at a distance and deride.
If I was too ashamed/proud to be seen queuing for food (we all do at a checkout in supermarkets anyway?), I would perfectly expect someone to ask me if I considered starving as more important than my presented image. Which would I rather be: embarrassed, or starving?
Do you know that the most educated people in the country are working hard to make poor people buy stuff they don't need? Who is actually running the advertising business and using the best technology ever invented to increase their profit at all cost? Who's to blame? Maybe be should just stop pushing people under stress to do stupid things and provide them with the best resources to fulfill their need. Money is an excellent medium for that when the game isn't just about blind profits.
I thought the car pickup was happening because buildings have been closed for social distancing?
give it some time
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-dest...
> In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.
which brings to mind John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:
> The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
And imagine those lines if they were just people. Wouldn't look like much.
Further, what were the lines like two months ago? Has it changed much? 1.5X? 2X? Is that the expected fraction of people with fragile economic situations?
Or cars make lines look big.
"Minneapolis, Minnesota: Cars line up at a drive-thru food pantry. "
Is only 200 cars by my counting.
I'm sure there is an untold problem, but I'm not big on trickery.
Not something that should happen in our modern world.
Note: all those people could afford gas. So its not just about poverty. Its about timing, shortages etc. Maybe they were all hoping for toilet paper...
We watch the world, seeing what others are doing and what works. Interesting times.