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Comment by hackable_sand | Hacker News Reader

What about food and housing? Why can't America invest in food and housing instead?

America has spent a century investing in food. We invested in food so hard we now have to pay farmers not to grow things, because otherwise the price crash would cause problems. Food in America is very cheap.

It's reassuring to be reminded that every child in America must justify their existence or starve to death.

Okay, that's too far. That's not true at all.

Children in America do not starve to death. There is no famine, economically manmade or otherwise.

This is America. We will happily allow and encourage your child to go into arbitrary amounts of debt from a young age to be fed at school.

There is definitely a type of famine going on in the US right now, 40 million are struggling with food insecurity. There is also a crises of healthy food being unaffordable, so people are essentially eating 2x their daily calories while getting 0.5x their daily nutrients. Then there are multiple political decisions that have already been made this year that will result in various forms of crop loss (migrants scared to show up at work) and disease outbreak (RFKJr's raw milk). The results of which are likely to impact food prices. The people who are hit hardest by this will already have been hit the hardest by greedflation in rent.

Words have meanings and it cheapens them to use them outside those meanings.

Either there is no famine in America, or I experienced famine in America yesterday when I was hungry because we were busy and had a late dinner.

I agree with everything you said except the use of the word "famine".

Christ…

What does that even mean and what do you want changed?

Ironically, this is currently second in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44836219 ("Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people")

Fair, I stand corrected.

> Food in America is very cheap.

And that's a whole different problem. Cheap != inexpensive.

Whether or not cheap and inexpensive mean the same thing, is contextually dependent. In some usages they have provide nuanced differences, while in others they are entirely identical.

In the context in which I was using it, they are identical.

the US systematically taxes and forbids new housing in many ways as local voters desire. Setback requirements, 100K+ hookup costs, stairway standards, density limits, parking minimums and regulations, community input, allowing rejection of new housing despite it following all rules, abuse of environmental regulations (which ends up hurting the environment by blocking density), affordable housing requirements (a tax on each new housing block to fund affordable units on the side) all prevent new housing form being built.

Having food and housing would make the population too comfortable. They want everyone a little on edge. You don't work, you don't eat.

Because investing in housing means actually changing things. There's a "Don't just do something, stand there!" strategy of maximizing comfort and minimizing effort, that must be overcome.

Is anyone starving in America? Why would there need to be focus on food production? We have huge food commodities.

Let them eat cake, right?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Or let them refuse to learn how to make cake, right?

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