Posted on 09/25/2022 5:23:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber
As you may know, the Biden Administration is planning to hold its big “White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health” this coming Wednesday, September 28. Apparently, we are to believe that “hunger” is and remains a significant problem today in the United States. Thankfully, we have President Biden and his many minions hard at work on the job, with a promise to finally end this scourge of human hunger once and for all. According to the announcement of the conference, “The Biden-Harris Administration has set the goal of ending hunger . . . by 2030.”
But wait a minute — hasn’t hunger in the United States already been ended? I seem to remember multiple prior government promises to end hunger in America, each of them followed by massive funding, and/or increases in prior already-massive levels of funding to achieve the goal. Are we only now learning that none of these prior efforts worked? If not, that would represent a huge failure of the government bureaucracies that had been charged with dealing with and solving this problem. Those same bureaucracies are still in place today, spending tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars annually and, if we are to believe President Biden, failing miserably in their prime responsibility of ending hunger. Shouldn’t those bureaucracies be held accountable for that failure?
It was May 6, 1969 — I was a freshman in college — when President Richard Nixon delivered his big address to Congress calling on them to “end hunger in America.” Excerpt:
in the past few years we have awakened to the distressing fact that despite our material abundance and agricultural wealth, many Americans suffer from malnutrition. . . . That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.
In his big address, Nixon proposed a thorough revamp of the various then-existing federal food programs, all designed to be sure that sufficient food got where it was needed to “end hunger.” According to the text of the address, the program revisions that the President was recommending would add approximately $1 billion per year to a pre-existing food distribution budget of about $1.5 billion per year, for a total of about $2.5 billion per year. (According to this CPI-based inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, $2.5 billion in 1969 dollars would translate to close to $20 billion in 2021 dollars.). Nixon then followed up on these big plans by holding his own “White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health” in December 1969., where he “fervently urged that hunger in America must be eliminated.”
Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. By that time, federal spending on food and nutrition programs had about doubled from the 1969 figure, to around $40 billion (in 2021 dollars.). Yet the press contained persistent reports of Americans going hungry, in spite of all the spending supposedly designed to prevent that from happening. In August 1983 Reagan created a Task Force to figure out how that could be, and issued an interesting Memorandum to the Task Force. Excerpt:
I have seen reports in the press in past weeks of Americans going hungry. I am deeply concerned by these stories. . . . At the same time, I admit to being perplexed by these accounts because, the fact is, federal law guarantees that every poor person with an income at or below 130% of the poverty level is eligible to receive free food stamps. Additional federal aid includes free school lunches, free school breakfasts; the Women, Infants and Childrens program, and numerous other federal programs. If the poor, who are eligible by law for this help, are not receiving it, then something is wrong.
But assertions that hunger persisted in America continued. Barack Obama was the President who really believed in federal food programs as the route to “end hunger,” and who pressed that goal throughout his campaign and then his time in office. As a candidate in 2008, Obama presented hunger in America as a continuing and serious problem, and pledged that it would be ended on his watch. From the Food Research & Action Center, October 2015:
In the fall of 2008, then-candidate barack Obama pledged that as President he would aggressively tackle hunger in America and eliminate childhood hunger.
Spending on federal food and nutrition programs had reached approximately $60 billion (2021 dollars) by the time Obama entered office, but then the spending really took off. The spending reached a peak of over $120 billion in 2015 before falling a bit to just under $120 billion by the time Obama left office. Here is a chart of federal food and nutrition program spending from 1980 to 2021, from the US Department of Agriculture:
In an early post on this blog from April 2013, I recounted how the federal government during the Obama administration aggressively recruited people to sign up for the food stamp program.
But Obama was a complete amateur compared to Biden. With the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the vehicle of his blow-out spending bills, Biden has taken federal food and nutrition spending to incredible new heights. Here is text accompanying that chart from the DOA:
Federal spending on USDA's food and nutrition assistance programs totaled $182.5 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2021, 49 percent more than the previous high of $122.8 in FY 2020. Spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) also reached a new high and increased by 44 percent from FY 2020 to FY 2021.
So in just Biden’s first year in office, federal food and nutrition spending soared by some $60 billion, which is about the entire level of such spending at the time Obama first took office less than 14 years ago.
According to the latest from the Census Bureau here, in 2021 there were about 37.9 million Americans deemed to be “in poverty” by the official measure. As discussed here many times, the number of people deemed “in poverty” by the official measure is a wildly inflated figure, ginned up by systematically excluding from the metric well over $1 trillion of annual in-kind distributions from the government, not the least of which is all federal food and nutrition assistance. Still, if you credit this figure of 37.9 million people “in poverty,” it would mean that the federal government in fiscal 2021 distributed some $4815 of food and nutrition aid for each and every one of them, or $19,261 for a family of four.
And now we are told that that enormous generosity by the American people still did not fix the problem. So the White House will hold a new big conference, undoubtedly to give every advocate a platform to come and demand yet more and more spending.
If you’re wondering how it could be possible to spend the incredible sum of $182.5 billion in one year on food and nutrition programs in American without eliminating hunger, one potential answer can be found in the recent series at PowerLine about the Minnesota Feeding Our Future scandal. According to recent federal indictments, scammers in this one incident stole well over $200 million in federal food aid and used it mainly to buy luxury goods and real estate for themselves.
Big fraud case by the Somali community in Minnesota.
The fraud at all levels in the “hunger crisis” is mind boggling. Government at every level is throwing $billions at the problem while charitable organization are involved on a private basis adding to the pot. It’s important to remember that corruption follows money, and we’re talking about a big pot of money.
Ah, but it’s not called hunger anymore, is it.
Not since Americans started to twig to the fact that Fedzilla’s definition, missing at least one meal in a month, meant everyone fit the bill.
Now it’s called...wait for it...food insecurity.
Can’t wait to see how Deep State defines THAT.
I know of no one who is hungry in the US. EBT users in the stores are fat as hell, 300-400 pounders.
Hunger is not ended because many use it as their political power. Our farmers could feed the whole world a few times over.
The definitions of Food insecurity are ridiculous. If you choose to skip lunch two days in a row you are technically food insecure.
YUP.
Same thing BLM hoods did.
Its easy to become rich in America by stealing government money under the guise of “doing good”.
The biggest thief of all time is sitting in the White House.
No doubt orchestrated by our resident Skinny, Ilhan Omar.
Hunger in America will end when parents learn to feed their kids instead of wasting money on cigarettes, booze, and drugs.
Welfare was never meant to be a career choice.
“Hunger In America: Why Hasn’t It Already Been Ended?”
Because hungry people are easier to control?
You see photos of the poorer neighborhoods across America and one thing stands out usually...
The obesity of the people living there...
With food stamps and other programs, malnutrition disappeared about 50 years ago.
It is extremely rare in the USA. The only people who suffer malnutrition are those for whom drugs and or alcohol are a higher priority than food, or for their children, or the mentally ill or their children.
Most of their children are taken from them and placed in foster care.
Because the left needs the image of poor people to fund raise and to gain votes, they had a problem. They solved their problem by moving from malnutrition to "hunger". Hunger was defined as, essentially "Have you, in the last month, been unable to eat the food you wanted, or skipped a meal when you did not want to."
The definition is wide and broad so as to make their pitch as impressive as possible.
It is all propaganda.
“parents learn to feed their kids instead of wasting money on cigarettes, booze, and drugs”
Obviously they do not think they are wasting money on cigarettes, booze and drugs—they think feeding their kids is wasting money!
Given that reality the best that can be hoped for is to train them using carrots and sticks—but we are talking obedience training here and not “learning”.
2022 is the year we need to talk honestly here—there is enough lying going on everywhere else.
Why should they pay to feed their kids when they can get free government money to do that?
Why don’t the press illuminate who these people are for our edification? They can’t because they don’t exist to the numbers being spent. No where near. If you offer it they will waddle up and take it…and tell their friends.
Hunger is an easy problem to fix. Just give every American $200 a month in food stamps - that is for rich people and that is for poor people - everybody gets their $200. If they swap that money for drugs to hell with them let them starve!
It has been ended
A family of four in Florida get $695 a month in food stamps. And a father and mother work. To me, that is ridiculous that they would still be eligible for food stamps when both parents are working. I think a lot of it has to do with the way the taxes are paid. First thing you do is not 24 grand off your total income. That’s a huge amount let’s take it off the top of your total income. Is it any wonder why so many are getting food stamps because it looks like you don’t make any money but you’re making a lot. Until IRS stops giving away free money on your taxes, you will see food stamps at a higher rate. Americans are hardly paying any federal taxes at all. And because of that, they are getting a lot of benny’s.
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