According to the USDA about 12% of American households were “food insecure” during some portion of the year. About 5.7% suffered from chronic “food insecurity”.
Food insecurity does not mean people do not have enough food, but rather sometime during the year, they were worried they would not get enough to eat (emphasis on the word “might”… not “did”).
They are uncertain they will have enough food in the future (next week, next month, etc). Nearly all of these people did “get food”, but often through various charitable organizations, so “food insecurity” does not translate into
starving” but rather is an indicator of people who do not earn enough to insure they have enough money to buy all the food they believe they need along with all there other needs.
Virtually all of these people do end up getting enough food to eat. Nearly all Americans that actually “starve” in the US are dementia patients who starve in institutional settings when the decision is made to withdraw all life support. So with the facts in place, let’s look at the trend with respect to food insecurity.
So the short term trend looks good… but what about longer term…
The marvels of capitalism…
Thanks to capitalism and its efficient use of resources there has never in the history of the world a time when people spent a smaller proportion of their income on food then they do today. This statistic speaks to the power of capitalism to harness a nation’s resources including food production.
In fact, our country produces so much food that we are undermining “food markets” around the world. Most Americans do not realize other countries have put massive tariffs on US farm products for fear we would wipe out their local farmers and make them dependent on the US for food. Some countries are even beginning to reject our “food” aide, where we give it free to help the starving for fear it will impoverish their local farmers.
So let’s recognize that capitalism is an amazing engine of productivity that has benefited not only Americans but the world and lifted more people out of poverty than any other single idea or concept. But its not perfect.
Poverty…
Food like any good or service is part of our market economy and around fifty million Americans simply do not earn enough income annually to be sure that they will have enough money to pay for all their needs. Food competes with many other needs and wants, the average person consumes around $2,641 of food per year. Surprisingly there is not a big difference between eating healthy and not eating healthy.
So the whole underlying premise of this article is misleading and wrong. I do acknowledge that we have people living in poverty and that for them the cost of “life” (not food) forces them to make decisions that often cause them not to spend their money on food (thus they become food insecure).
Attempts to address this problem include “food” entitlement programs designed to insure people get enough “money” for food. Recent proposals to change these food entitlement programs have included cutting back on “money for food” and replacing it with “food” to insure the people get enough food and do not divert the “food money” to other purposes. Is this a better approach to “food insecurity”? Maybe…
War on Poverty…
We will never solve “poverty” since as our economy grows more prosperous (thanks to capitalism) we redefine poverty. Here are some interesting results from the Census Bureau…
“The report claims that in 2013, 14.5 percent of Americans were poor. Remarkably, that’s almost the same poverty rate as in 1967, three years after the War on Poverty started. How can that be? How can government spend $9,000 per recipient and have no effect on poverty? The answer is — it can’t.
Census counts a family as poor if its “income” falls below certain thresholds. But in counting “income,” Census ignores almost all of the $943 billion in annual welfare spending. This, of course, makes the Census poverty figures very misleading.
The actual living conditions of households labeled as poor by Census are surprising to most people. According to the government’s own surveys, 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television; half have a personal computer; 40 percent have a wide-screen HDTV. Three-quarters own a car or truck; nearly a third has two or more vehicles.
Ninety-six percent of poor parents state that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food. Some 82 percent of poor adults reported that they were never hungry at any time in the prior year.
As a group, poor children are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children, and in most cases is well above recommended norms.
Less than 2 percent of the poor are homeless. Only 10 percent live in a mobile home.
The average poor American lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair and not over-crowded. In fact, the average poor American has more living space than the typical non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.”
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-war-poverty-50-years-failure
Summary…
Does this mean we should sit back and congratulate ourselves (no, but neither should we condemn ourselves and the last thing we want to do is upset the economic engine that has produced these results). Whether it is food, housing, or health care, we need to rethink our entitlement programs to insure they achieve what we wanted them do…
Capitalism has allowed us to spend more than $1 trillion on poverty programs… but are we getting what we wanted from that spending or are there better ways to realize those goals we set as a nation when we launched our “war on poverty”.
