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Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." - Matthew 22:36-40

Any attempt to use the Christian bible to justify massive inequality is a bastardization of Jesus' teachings.

We're not talking about inequality in the sense that people deserve all the same things. Everyone deserves at least to be fed, housed, and taken care of when sick. A society capable of such but unwilling is disgusting.

Maybe you could debate to what degree we could provide for each other. We don't have limitless resources and capabilities. But certainly, we have the ability to provide everyone with clean water, food, and housing at this point.

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I come from a poor south asian country. The idea that western countries like US, Canada etc don't have "food and shelter" is absurd. I can understand examples like Flint's water issue but that's the fault of the very politicians people keep voting in again and again. It's not the fault of all the rich people.

Everyone who's willing to put a tiny bit of effort can get food and shelter thanks to food banks, shelters etc. Back in my country, we don't have that luxury yet but a lot of religious places are trying their best at providing that.

I am not religious myself but I do think they should play an important role at feeding those who don't have the resources yet.

Once your basic necessity like food and water have been solved, it's up to you to work your way up.

America is one of the most obese countries with obesity being more prevalent at lower income levels, yet we keep hearing about how people are starving.

A quick google would help educate you:

https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/07/18/hunger-and-obesity-jessica-fa...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-17/how-hu...

Long story short is that a better concept isn't starvation, it's food insecurity. More than 10% of Americans are food insecure.

"many of the same people who struggle with extra weight also regularly go to bed hungry,"

That’s a bad thing? I understand that eating healthy food is important, but if you’re obese, you should go hungry, that’s one part of losing weight.

Yeah it's a bad thing when you're not sure if you're going to eat that day and if you do it comes from McDonalds.

In my poor country, McDonalds is considered the rich people food.

Decent healthy food is not expensive. I have lived through it myself and plenty of us have.

I don't think it's unreasonable to include more things under "basic necessities" nowadays. Things like security, education, healthcare, internet access are all common candidates.

The problem in America derives from politics. There are two main issues.

The first is that politicians are selected by the rich. Since a Supreme Court Ruling (Citizens United), unnamed donors are able to give infinite money to political campaigns. So the rich buy the politicians and then the politicians decrease regulation and increase subsidies for the rich people's companies who elected them.

The second is that there is lots of aid and available resources but the government makes it hard to access this aid. Part of the government (the Republicans) doesn't want this aid to exist so they purposely make the administration of the aid very difficult to get. It becomes a full time job just getting free things creating a cycle of poverty and dependency. You can see the Republican party doing this with the US Postal Service right now. They mess up the program and then claim it doesn't work.

For America to improve, money must be eliminated from elections. We need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Next, we must make programs simple and easy to obtain the benefit from. It shouldn't take multiple hours a day to get "free" food. This is why some people support the idea of a universal basic income. It would help the poor the most with the least amount of government overhead.

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