Economic recovery leads to . . . increased poverty and hunger.

[MrFun]

Growing Number Of Americans Can't Afford Food, Study Finds

The Huffington Post Alexander Eichler
First Posted: 02/28/2012 6:56 pm Updated: 02/29/2012 12:55 pm

Here in the United States, growing numbers of people can't afford that most basic of necessities: food.

More Americans said they struggled to buy food in 2011 than in any year since the financial crisis, according to a recent report from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research group. About 18.6 percent of people -- almost one out of every five -- told Gallup pollsters that they couldn't always afford to feed everyone in their family in 2011.

One might assume that number got smaller wrapped up with the national unemployment rate falling for several consecutive months. In actuality, the reverse proved true: the number of people who said they couldn't afford food just kept rising and rising.

The findings from FRAC highlight what many people already know: The economic recovery, in theory now more than two years old, has done little to keep millions of Americans out of poverty and deprivation. Incomes for many haven't kept pace with the cost of living, and for a large swath of the country, things today are as bad as ever, or worse.

Forty-six million people lived below the poverty line as of 2010, a record number, according to the Census Bureau, and one that's not even as high as some other estimates would have it. Take a further step back and the situation appears even more dire. About 45 percent of people in the U.S. have reported not being able to cover their basic living expenses, including food, shelter and transportation, according to the group Wider Opportunities for Women.

The official poverty rate is about 15 percent, but over two-fifths of Americans have so little saved that one financial emergency is all it would take to put them in poverty, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development.

These high rates of financial insecurity -- a consequence of the weak job market, and the prevalence of jobs that don't pay very well -- are making themselves felt at the level of everyday spending.

Recently, for example, a Center for Housing Policy study found that a growing number of middle-income owners and renters are paying more than half their earnings just to keep a roof over their heads. And as of 2009, almost one in five Americans over 50 years old were skipping on doctor visits, switching to cheaper medications or forgoing some medicines entirely out of financial necessity, according to a recently published study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank.

As for widespread hunger of the kind recorded by FRAC, research shows that the entire country ends up paying one way or another. While the people who can't afford food are obviously suffering the worst, the social costs incurred -- from the money spent to keep food pantries open to the lifelong diminished earning power of impoverished children -- come to about $167 billion a year, or $542 for every man, woman and child in the country.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...e_Based_Racial

[rah]

Hmm, quoting a conservative site that might be a bit biased to make the recovery not look like a recovery in order to hurt Obama's chance of re-election.
That's a FOX NEWS tactic.
This is not something I would have expected from you.

[MrFun]

Ha ****in' ha.

[regexcellent]

Has anyone else noticed that people talk about "food security" these days instead of hunger? Like, there was an article in the Washington Post a while back by a guy who operated a food charity or somesuch about how "hunger in America is real." To demonstrate he talked about how such percentage of Americans are "at risk of hunger." What does that mean?

Basically what I'm saying is that as we become less and less hungry, the goalposts get moved to make it seem like some people are still destitute. Kind of like how the poverty line adjusts itself to always encompass some portion of the population, thus making elimination of poverty by definition impossible.

Note that this article uses the same tactic to say that people who aren't in poverty are in poverty, because they could be in poverty in the future. It's absurd.

[Felch]

I'm glad we have a college kid whose never been hungry in his life to set us straight.

That was a close one.

[Oncle Boris]

re:gexcellent

No, it means that it's more than 15% of people who need food banks, not just at all times.

[gribbler]

They SAY they can't afford food. But how many of them actually don't get enough to eat? Are food stamps really insufficient?

[Hauldren Collider]

I'm glad we have a college kid whose never been hungry in his life to set us straight.

That was a close one.

You're only hungry because you're stoned out of your mind

[DaShi]

Has anyone else noticed that people talk about "food security" these days instead of hunger? Like, there was an article in the Washington Post a while back by a guy who operated a food charity or somesuch about how "hunger in America is real." To demonstrate he talked about how such percentage of Americans are "at risk of hunger." What does that mean?

Basically what I'm saying is that as we become less and less hungry, the goalposts get moved to make it seem like some people are still destitute. Kind of like how the poverty line adjusts itself to always encompass some portion of the population, thus making elimination of poverty by definition impossible.

Note that this article uses the same tactic to say that people who aren't in poverty are in poverty, because they could be in poverty in the future. It's absurd.

The term food security is used to better describe the issues around hunger. It doesn't mean that people are experiencing less hunger.

[regexcellent]

I just can't shake the feeling that we're hearing about "food insecurity" and people who are "at risk of hunger" now though because we're running out of actually hungry people to run TV ads about. I'm not trying to belittle the situation. It's just worth noting that we've made a lot of progress on hunger over the years, but the charities that exist to fight it still exist and have an incentive for self-preservation.

[DaShi]

I can't do anything about your feelings.

[Oncle Boris]

I just can't shake the feeling that we're hearing about "food insecurity" and people who are "at risk of hunger" now though because we're running out of actually hungry people to run TV ads about. I'm not trying to belittle the situation. It's just worth noting that we've made a lot of progress on hunger over the years, but the charities that exist to fight it still exist and have an incentive for self-preservation.

No you moron, it means that food banks have to be ready at all times to serve a certain % of the "food insecure" population.

Use shocking pictures of suffering people, be accused of sensationalism.
Use rational concepts, be accused of running out of suffering people!

[The Mad Monk]

Is there something wrong with running out of suffering people?

[Hauldren Collider]

Yeah, then a lot of charities will suddenly be purposeless.

[gribbler]

They could re-dedicate themselves to creating suffering people. For example, become a pro-life "charity" and urge pregnant teens to carry their fetus to term and put it up for adoption.

[Jon Miller]

Or they could go around killing children

JM

[C0ckney]

Has anyone else noticed that people talk about "food security" these days instead of hunger? Like, there was an article in the Washington Post a while back by a guy who operated a food charity or somesuch about how "hunger in America is real." To demonstrate he talked about how such percentage of Americans are "at risk of hunger." What does that mean?

i think it was loinburger who posted that around 2,500 americans die every year from malnutrition.

[The Mad Monk]

How many of those are due to eating disorders like anorexia, or outright child abuse? Serious question. I've seen both reported on the news, but never simple starvation.

edit: I'll throw addiction in there, too. It's how my cousin died under the Atlantic City boardwalk a couple years ago.

[Jon Miller]

malnutrition...

they could be eating plenty

I was suspicious that some of the kids at my church in newport news were not getting enough of the right food

JM

[C0ckney]

How many of those are due to eating disorders like anorexia, or outright child abuse? Serious question. I've seen both reported on the news, but never simple starvation.

edit: I'll throw addiction in there, too. It's how my cousin died under the Atlantic City boardwalk a couple years ago.

i really don't know, the number wasn't broken down.

[Oncle Boris]

Is there something wrong with running out of suffering people?

I'll have to presume you missed the point.

[MrFun]

I just can't shake the feeling that we're hearing about "food insecurity" and people who are "at risk of hunger" now though because we're running out of actually hungry people to run TV ads about. I'm not trying to belittle the situation. It's just worth noting that we've made a lot of progress on hunger over the years, but the charities that exist to fight it still exist and have an incentive for self-preservation.

Stupid. Post.

[Al B. Sure!]

Stupid. Post.

Stupid or stupid-gay?

[MrFun]

stupid-straight

[MrFun]

or maybe stupid-negro

[Al B. Sure!]

or maybe stupid-negro

I have a friend who every time someone does something nice for him, he says "that's mighty white of you".

[MrFun]

I have a friend who every time someone does something nice for him, he says "that's mighty white of you".

[rah]

I have a friend who every time someone does something nice for him, he says "that's mighty white of you".

That used to be quite a common phrase.

[MrFun]

Silicon Valley Homeless Feel The Grip Of Recession's Long Reach
Posted: 03/01/12 10:00 AM ET | Updated: 03/01/12 10:29 AM ET


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REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- The first time Michele arrived at the Maple Street homeless shelter three years ago, she was still driving her BMW 325xi, the final remnant of her Silicon Valley affluence.

Her paper wealth of more than $2 million had evaporated a decade earlier, she says, via a stock options fiasco. She had used the options to buy stock in her high-flying software startup, netting a seven-figure profit by the government's reckoning, but then held the shares until they were nearly worthless. That left her with no cash and a $200,000 tax bill. She had sold nearly everything to cover it: her house, her remaining stocks, her art collection.

Periods of joblessness, punctuated by depression and bouts with alcoholism filled out the ensuing years, with cause and effect blurring into a cohesive whole -- one life, unraveling.

She had used the shelter as a way station, finding a new job at another software company within two months and then moving into a rented apartment. But by last November, just before Thanksgiving, she was out of work again, broke again, and back at the shelter, again. This time, she arrived on foot, carrying a backpack that contained all she had left in the world: some clothes, about ten dollars in cash, her laptop computer and her mother's Omega watch.

She had spent the past four nights inside a Happy Donut, using free Wi-fi to watch "Top Chef" reruns on her laptop. Exhausted, dirty and devoid of a plan, she took refuge at the shelter for single adults, a low-slung building on a dead-end road in an industrial area, across the street from a tire recycling center and next to a prison.

Back when she was traveling regularly for business, she had favored suites at Four Seasons hotels. Now, she checked in to the Maple Street women's dorm, a brown-carpeted room jammed with five bunk beds. She slipped into a top bunk and absorbed the reality that it had come to this.

Her resume, with a degree in electrical engineering from Duke University and stints in senior positions at software companies, including a post in Paris, had once made her an exemplar of Silicon Valley success. A combination of personal troubles, long-term unemployment and bleak economic times had since turned her into an example of something else: the new suburban poor proliferating in nearly every American metropolitan area -- even here, within miles of the shimmering campuses of Google, Apple and other wellsprings of unfathomable wealth.

"It rips you to the core," says Michele, 49, who used to order room service and, on a recent evening, dined on sandwiches donated to the shelter by Google. (She asks that her full name not be disclosed, fearing embarrassment and the loss of job prospects.) "It's devastating to look at the money you had, the freedom that it gives, and to realize that it's gone. For me, money has always been about security, having control. Now, your whole life is out of control and everything is unknown. You're at other people's mercy and you feel useless. You're stuck. It just can be debilitating, if you really focus on that."

Though her plunge from executive-level wealth to street-level homelessness is extreme, it has become a not-unfamiliar story among case workers at the seven shelters and transitional housing facilities operated by Shelter Network here in San Mateo county, where the wait list for space is at an all-time high. Overall, the number of homeless people in San Mateo increased by 17 percent between 2009 and 2011, according to a recent county census.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...?ref=breakdown

talk about extreme situations . . .

[Provost Harrison]

She should've taken care of a pension by that point and making sure everything was run correctly...I am not convinced that, with proper planning and preventative measures you should ever have to descend into that mess.