Posted on 10/05/2011 6:45:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 by declaring, “One in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.
When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients from one income level to another.
That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Sen. John Edwards was running for vice president. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.
Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue from, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.
The political Left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the “hunger in America” hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.
Burgers, pizzas, and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25 by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is “to get people to see cooking as a joy.” For this, he says, “we need action both cultural and political.” In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!
Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don’t find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don’t always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.
An arrogant elite’s condescension toward the people — treating them as children who have to be jollied along — is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening society.
Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.
We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and either cars or trucks.
Why are such people called “poor”? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.
Those who believe in an expansive, nanny-state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.
Politicians, welfare-state bureaucrats, and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Stop buying cigarettes, beer, good chains, cable, smart phones, tattoos, and piercings..... and FEED YOUR KIDS!
Tribal habits are hard to break!
My concern is that this nonsense is self-fulfilling. They will enact more socialist panaceas that will indeed leave most of us hungry.
I shop carefully, and my weekly grocery bill for four is $100, again, plus or minus a few dollars.
So, I feed my family for a week for the cost of four lunches or dinners at McD's. And, we eat pretty well. I could easily shave some more off that bill, if necessary.
The problem isn't a lack of food, or a lack of money. It's just a lack of intelligence and/or discipline.
I almost upchucked yesterday when I read that Sesame Street is going to introduce a “Hunger Muppet,” supposedly representing children who suffer from what they call “food insecurity,” to call attention to what they refer to as the “problem of hunger in the US.”
The only kids who may be hungry are those whose parents are too strung out on drugs or alcohol or partying to bother to feed them, but that’s not a new problem.
The whole point of this is to create an image of a desperate population waiting for socialist salvation.
Being poor is a state of mind, being broke is a temporary economic situation. Poor people stay poor because they do poor people stuff. Broke people will some day become wealthy because they will behave like rich people.
I agree, as per usual, with Sowell’s viewpoint.
I was listening to a radio ad the other day that mentioned a similar statistic regarding the number of American’s who go to bed hungry, i.e., 1 in 6. This struck me as being hyperbole but it would have been more useful if Dr. Sowell could have provided some more up to date information on actual numbers.
We have the world’s richest and fattest poor people.
Several years ago, the three local network affiliates started drives to collect food for the needy at Christmas. They all made so much attention for themselves, they have since expanded their food drives to where they have one at least Quarterly, and the only goal is to try and top one another for the sheer weight of the donated food they collect.
Same goes at Christmas with toy drives. They try and out-collect each other for the sheer number, size and volume by weight in donated toys, all for supposedly disadvantaged children.
Same goes starting in early August when the school supply drives start up, collecting literally tons of donated school supplies that all of the parents of these supposedly “disadvantaged” kids cannot afford to purchase for them.
I’m betting that every single Freeper who reads these comments has seen the exact same things going on in the city they live in as well. We have this myth going that there are millions of “disadvantaged” kids that need all of this help, but there is never any kind of proof offered that the need actually exists, or that the people who are showing up to collect all of this free stuff actually need it in the first place.
Frankly, most of the “poor” I see are packing around more extra pounds than I am, have a newer cellphone than I do, newer shoes, the latest bling; the list of examples is endless. This is indeed a hoax that is being foisted on the public that still works for a living, and I’m sick of the non-stop demands to kick in ever increasing amounts of largess that I am expected to just cough up with no questions asked.
Go to any poor middle school in America and look around to see the truth.
Rampent childhood obesity is the reality amoung poor kids, hunger? lol 80% of those kids could use a little hunger.
That's because a Republican was president. Ahh, back in the good old days when we used to go into poor neighborhoods, knock down doors and carry out everything in the pantry and refrigerator.
One trick is to define "hunger" creatively. One definition included hunger if you didn't have enough variety in your food, so if you are eating a lot of rice and beans because they are cheap, then you are hungry even if you've developed a gut from all the food you're eating. You can also be "hungry" if you are worried that you won't be able to buy enough food. So if you have to scrape to make ends meet, but you are still able to buy enough food after shaking out the couch cushions you will be counted as hungry.
And don't forget the tattoos. These people spend more on tattoo's than I make!
From March 3, 2010:
The Obama administration announced Tuesday a new formula that will take into account a wider range of factors in determining who is poor. The Supplemental Poverty Measure will provide a more accurate portrait, the administration says, of how many Americans are struggling financially, though it will not entirely replace the existing poverty measure in use since the mid-1960s.
The new measure is expected to show that the poverty rate in America is higher than the number produced under the existing formula.
It is just like the time the feds redefined 'obesity'. I went to sleep while I wasn't obese and woke up obese because the government made me that way.
If we had actual poverty and hunger in these United States - we wouldn’t be importing it wholesale from the Third World.
He lied.
In 1948 when JFK was running for Congress he started a sentence, "Now that no one goes to bed hungry in America ...," and then pitched some other program he was advocating. My quote may not be exact, but it's close. Long ago I saw a film clip of him giving the speech. It would be nice to find it and throw it back in the faces of the whiners from time to time.
ML/NJ
“I really want to move to a country where even the poor people are fat.”
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