Again I don't want to come off as cold and uncompassionate, but from a factual standpoint any well meaning women and beloved children who are in fact starving in America are doing so because they are not citizens or 'legal' immigrants ... and as such are not eligible for SNAP, WIC, 'free' school breakfasts and lunches, various state run programs like CACFP, etc. And even for those US residents who are not 'legally' eligible for these various gov't run 'free' food programs, there are also a host of privately run 'free' food sources available ... although they may require the recipients to sit through an 'earful' while eating their free dinners.
from
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog...-starving.html
(snip)"The truth of the matter is Americans are fat and getting fatter. As late as 1990, not a single U.S. state had an obesity rate above 15%*. In 2010, merely 20 years later, a dozen states have an obesity rate over 30%. And most shockingly, 69.2% of Americans age 20 or over are obese or overweight.
So that leads to a rather obvious contradiction: How can Americans be both obese and on the verge of starvation?
The answer is simple: Very few, if any, Americans are literally starving. Instead, a considerable number of Americans live in "food insecure households." And progressive activists like Mr. Berg dishonestly use the word "starvation" to refer to what would happen to these people if there were no food stamps.
What is a food insecure household? The USDA determines if a household is "food insecure" based on the responses to a survey (PDF, page 3) which asks questions like:
"We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more." Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?
Another example question:
In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn't enough money for food? (Yes/No)
Using this method, the USDA determined that 17.9 million households (14.9%) were food insecure in 2011. So, that's how Mr. Berg comes up with the claim that mass starvation would occur if there were no food stamps.
Of course, this absurd conclusion ignores two very relevant points: First, Americans are very generous people, possibly the most generous in the world. It is very difficult to imagine an America where churches and charities ignore starving people in the streets. Second, just because a household is "food insecure" doesn't mean that it struggles to buy food every day. In fact, households classified as having "very low food security" have trouble buying food a few times per month for 7 months out of the year. In other words, they're eating most of the time.
Nobody wants to see a person, particularly a child, go hungry -- even for a day. But, to characterize this as potential "mass starvation" is really inconsiderate of the millions of people in the world who are actually starving. Hyperbole only serves to downplay the seriousness of global poverty and starvation in the developing world. (snip)
Down here way south of the border, there are in fact some REAL starvation situations in neighboring countries. However, even then, the true causes have little to do with actual food shortages. I can't really elaborate due to the politics ban.
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