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Comment by roflyear | Hacker News Reader

I don't think many look at wealth inequality in isolation, it's usually accompanied by how people are starving. E.g. "over 20 people die from malnutrition in the US but we have over 900 billionaire's" - e.g. each billionaire would probably only have to give $300k each (equiv to what the average tax payer gives to the defense budget each year) to prevent most deaths in the US due to lack of food - etc.

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I get the feeling that you're winging the specific numbers because they're spectacularly incoherent.

But anyway, the United States is extremely rich and has essentially no big problems that can be solved by a small amount (say, a few billion) of money. The problems are either so big that it would take trillions to solve (supporting aging population etc), or blocked by something other than money (politics, regulations, etc). The big problems that can be solved just by throwing a few billion at them are solved quite easily by either the government or by private entities like the Gates Foundation.

In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve.

It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.

One of the things you learn quickly when you look at these kind of problems is that they’re not so easy to solve with money. The budget for SNAP, the US’s primary food benefits program, is about $100 billion; the additional $270 million you propose would be a tiny drop in the bucket.

883 billion divided by 200 million is like 4 grand. How do you figure each taxpayer pays 300k/yr in taxes to the defense budget?

You make your currency the reserve currency, tax the world by inflating it while restricting circulation, print money, then borrow.

When people or countries potentially disrupt the equilibrium, kill them.

Sorry, I meant the math part

In the US, the poorest people suffer from an obesity epidemic. Virtually no one is starving in the US anymore, besides mental health problems or other edge cases creating it.

The poor are food insecure. This leads to obesity not because they have access to an abundance of food but because their access to food is not stead, leading to over eating to compensate, and the food they can afford is not healthy.

> the food they can afford is not healthy

Are you really claiming that it's cheaper to buy an appetite-satisfying amount of unhealthy food (chips/sweets/snacks/fast food) than fresh vegetables and staples like rice or potatoes?

Serious question.

Yes, both cheaper and more accessible and easier to eat without having to spend the time (which the working poor don't have) to then cook the raw foods. They're called food deserts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Thanks for the link. I agree that preparation time is an important consideration. I do think that the food desert criterion (> 1.6km to the nearest supermarket in urban centres) seems very restrictive -- this would make half of most suburbs "food deserts" in the affluent western country where I live.

I find the more recent concept of "food swamps", also explained on that page, to be a (perhaps unwitting) direct challenge to the theory that absence of nearby healthy food is the root cause:

> A related concept is the phenomenon of a food swamp, a recently coined term by researchers who defined it as an area with a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants (and fast food advertising) in comparison to the number of supermarkets in that area.[13] The single supermarket in a low-income area does not, according to researchers Rose and colleagues, necessitate availability nor does it decrease obesity rates and health risks

If this claim is true -- that is, if areas with 1 nearby supermarket have obesity rates no better than areas with 0 -- then it's essentially impossible to blame health outcomes on the availability of healthy food nearby. If an area has nearby supermarkets, it is much harder to make the case that obesity is purely the result of external factors outside a person's control.

A fancy Nissin Cup of Noodle is $0.80 and 300 caloriesz. I just bought 2 lbs of hamburger meat for $15.

Food insecure people load up on cheap carbs. Most of them don’t know you to cook or lack gear and will buy a $5/16oz boil in bag rice vs. a 10lb bag for $6.

Volunteering at a food bank in any large city will change your perspective.

If you’re not where the rubber meets the road your knowledge of a system will always be incomplete and inaccurate. Literal trade secret of S Class developers, you’re welcome.

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