Hungry for the Holidays - 20 Mindblowing Facts about Hunger in America

Here is a quote of just five of the 20 facts about hunger in America from the article. Seriously ... read the article. Read the 20 facts. If this doesn't tell you all something is very wrong in this country .. heck, in the world ... then I don't know what will.

Economic Collapse - Hungry for the Holidays

#5 According to new numbers that were just released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans living in poverty increased to a new all-time record high of 49.7 million last year.

#6 The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by about 6 million over the past four years.

#7 Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.

#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for children living in the United States is about 22 percent.

#9 Overall, approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either "low income" or impoverished.

#10 In the United States today, close to 100 million Americans are considered to be either "poor" or "near poor".

The system in the USA isn't working. The world system isn't working. We can blame governments. We can blame personal responsibility of those who procreate and who can't afford to. (watch Maury sometime! :shk: ) We can blame religious extremists and religious wars sucking up our money in defense programs. We can blame greed. We can blame moochers and leeches. We can blame lack of education and people not being capable of better jobs. We can blame a lot of things ...

But I don't think anyone can argue the fact that 'the world' just isn't working.
It's all very sad. And I don't know what the answer is ...

i blame a rapidly increasing population being subjected to systems of governance and commerce that were never intended to function with such high population density

the days of starting from scratch and becoming a success off the sweat of your own brow are gone... the world is owned in whole and from that point on it all becomes little more than a pyramid scheme

Originally posted by FlyersFan
We can blame religious extremists and religious wars sucking up our money in defense programs. We can blame greed. We can blame moochers and leeches. We can blame lack of education and people not being capable of better jobs. We can blame a lot of things ...

...We can only blame ourself...

When we stop finding excuses for the problems, and realise we are ALL part of the problem, we can begin to change. What could YOU do to change the situation??

Okay, now I feel really bad. I just cleaned out my fridge yesterday, throwing out a ton of food that was starting to go off. Here I am throwing away food, when there are so many children with empty bellies. I do regularly contribute to food banks, but it's not enough...

I don't know what the answer is. The immediate need is to put food in people's bellies. We should not cut food stamps out of the budget. Cut the defense budget, cut congress salaries, cut anything, but don't cut what is keeping some people from starving to death.

The long-term answer is a lot more complicated. I read a statistic that richer people are having fewer children and poorer people are having more children. There's something wrong with that picture. What's the answer there? More education? Free contraception? Free abortions? Forced contraception??? Forced abortions???? I just don't know where to cross the line between personal liberty and what's best for our country.

How to get people back to work? Greed is certainly an issue here. How to solve that problem? Should we outlaw outsourcing? Force CEO's to take lower salaries, so that money could be used to hire more people or pay higher wages to existing employees? Again, where's the line between a free market system and what's best for all the citizens of our country?

How do we get lazy people to stop taking advantage of the system? No clue there.

I'm glad I'm not running the country, because I would be totally stumped on what to do.

reply to post by FlyersFan


100 million in poverty? Or 50 million? I'm confused on the numbers here?

reply to post by AK907ICECOLD


Looks like 49.7 million are poor while another 50 million or so are near poor... making the combined number 100 million.

It's a shame things have gotten so bad, no matter who is to blame.

reply to post by FlyersFan
I think the world in general has always been this way. It's just that we're getting better at keeping score and sharing the information around so that awareness of inequality grows more obvious.

Now I realise the thread is chiefly focused on the US and the argument still stands that a huge percentage of Americans (from day 1) have been on or below the poverty line.

A problem is finding a poverty line everyone can agree with; after all, it's as much a political tool as a statistical one. For example, if we took 100 US poor and stood them next to 100 Indian poor and 100 Somalian poor...we'd see that one man's poverty is another's idea of wealthy.

I agree it's depressing that most of the world is below a poverty line according to one agency or another. It just isn't clear how we can raise the living standards of between 1 and 2 billion hungry people who are deep beneath the line (or just under a billion?).

I think it's due largely to a lack of math skills:

$2,000 monthly income
- divided by -
2 adults
= $1,000 per person, per month

but,
$2,000 monthly income
- divided by -
2 adults, four children with number 5 on the way
= $285 per person, per month

But maybe I do fuzzy math. As this pattern repeats and repeats, we end up with the percentage of intelligent, hard-working people plummeting in the US because we will have a smaller and smaller percentage of children being raised in households who treat children as a responsibility, and not the inconvenient by-product of sex. There needs to be an intelligent, thoughtful discussion in the US on the merits of family planning that isn't guided by one single holy book. And since that isn't going to happen, the issue you speak of OP, won't be resolved.

There are other contributing factors aside from this one, but when we can't count on potential parents to correctly analyze their resources to determine availability when adding another person, we can't sincerely count on much. Parents are the ones who are supposed to care most.

Honestly, this may do absolutely nothing to help, but I honestly think it would help a little.

Every high school in this country should REQUIRE classes on how to budget money, how to get a job interview, sex education that IS NOT ABSTINENCE ONLY, parenting classes, how to pay bills, explaining mortgages, loans, etc etc. Everything could be split into 2 classes and easily added into the high school requirements.

Seriously, in my high school we had "cooking" where we would cook something like a cake. Now I'm wishing we had been taught basic cooking skills, rather than cake baking skills. Sewing, where everyone sat around and talked and never did much sewing. We had child development, which I took out of interest, but there was about 5 of us in there, all female, because no one wanted to take it. Two of the five were pregnant.

Other than that, unless you were in Special Education, there were no life skills classes offered. Maybe other schools have a lot of them.

Honestly, rather than taking 4 years of algebra, I could have got a lot more out of some life skills classes.

reply to post by tport17


I thought everyone did have those classes already..... In NY we had them. Home Ec, taught us basic cooking, job interviews, book keeping. Some of the parenting section was kind of a joke, we had to take care of an egg
But also, real babies were brought in for a few days, taught us how to change diapers, hold them properly while feeding them....

reply to post by TKDRL


We had pretty much what I listed above and none of it was mandatory so there was usually only 5-8 students in the class. We had nothing on finances.

Our school did better than carrying an egg around for the child development class. We actually had those babies that are programmed to cry until you hold a key in them for so long. They had some kind of monitor that told the teacher how often the baby cried and how long we let it cry. Mine only cried twice the entire weekend I had it, so it ended up being kind of pointless.

Either way, it wasn't mandatory and no one wanted to take it. If it was required to graduate then maybe it would make a difference.

reply to post by tport17


That one for us was mandatory, for half of the year in 8th grade, last year of JR high. The other half of the year was, I forget what they called it, some fancy name. We learned basic handyman type things in that one though.

I have a plan to solve virtually any and all economic issues that doesnt require secession, giving up the fed, removing the nation from the fiat free fall the rest of the world is experiencing or even closing down the hundreds of military bases we have in every nation on Earth.

A $100 gift certificate to Walmart for getting a vasectomy.

Beware of these statistics, they usualy do not include things like welfare and food stamps. "Poor" in this case means "would be poor if the government didnt take care of them". There is very little real hunger or poverty in America, like what we see in poor countries, and if there is, it is often self-inflicted.