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.
I’m a member of an American Legion Post that used to assemble and distribute a few dozen Thanksgiving baskets for the needy in town. Everything from a turkey and stuffing to pies and cranberry sauce went into the baskets.
A few years ago I went to help load the baskets and found they had stopped the program and weren’t giving out baskets anymore. So I asked why.
Because it was always the same people receiving the baskets, year after year, I was told.
Hmmm. Interesting.
I've largely given up on these sorts of campaigns for exactly that reason. The 'poor' kids would ask for high-end fashion and electronic gifts that we could ill afford to buy for our own kids. When I helped out at our middle school's school store in September I'd have 'poor' kids in expensive clothes carrying cell phones and iPods hand me vouchers from the guidance department so that they didn't have to pay for their gym clothes, school spirit t-shirts or school supplies. I never saw any gratitude - only attitude. My kids confirm that they see the same. These are also the kids most likely to throw their (free) lunch food around in food fights or to toss it in the trash uneaten. The soft-headed liberals have created a monster.
Once again, Thomas Sowell has hit many nails on the head with his mighty hammer. The real story though, is that the income of poor people does not include benefits received from the government. The government could give every person $100,000 worth of benefits each year and they would still be under the poverty level. The way they calculate it, no program will EVER decrease the number of poor people.
After being in the grocery store accidentally on the 1st throughout he 5th of the month I find it very hard to believe that there are any kids going hungry n America anywhere.Most of them look like they could safely skip a few meals and still be overweight.
After being in the grocery store accidentally on the 1st through the 5th of the month I find it very hard to believe that there are any kids going hungry n America anywhere.Most of them look like they could safely skip a few meals and still be overweight.
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