[wfhordie]

>For whatever reason positive news tends not to play well on HN, even if it’s factual.

People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.

Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:

>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)

That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.

This rate should be <1%.

[CodeSgt]

By no means are 18.1% of the population living in "abject" poverty. They're living in what the US government classifies as poverty, but in the majority of these cases they still have a home, have food, have electricity, etc.

I'm not saying that they're living comfy lives, but when you throw around terms like "abject povery" you're really discrediting people who are actually living in abject poverty.

What are your plans to get the rate below 1%? What would you have done differently that wouldn't have wrecked the economy?

[wfhordie]

Ah, I love this game. It's the same one that the super-rich use to convince people barely scraping by -- or anyone who hasn't read Barbara Ehrenreich -- that you should zoom out far enough so that your situation is compared to literal kids with literal flies on their eyeballs. Your life ain't that bad, why you complainin'?

The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.

And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.

[CodeSgt]

I was just correcting your misusage of the term. Everything else you've said has come from you projecting your beliefs onto the discussion.

I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.

Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.

[refurb]

Are you saying other countries don’t have “very poor”?

You’d be wrong then. Countries with universal healthcare and other social programs still have the very poor.

[spywaregorilla]

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

~10% of households experience food insecurity in the US. So assume that's a direct overlap, that would be most of the 18%

[wfhordie]

That number should piss you off.

The U.S. was by far the leading global agricultural exporter in 2020 with exports valued at $147.9 billion. [0]

And it's not like it's hard to get the food from where it's grown to where it's needed. The US has a navigable waterway system that is smack dab in the middle of both where the food is grown and where it is eaten by the most people. That's not a coincidence.[1]

I'm not playing semantic games about whether the households experiencing food insecurity are 'working poor' 'abject poor' or 'totally fucked poor'. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a problem that we can solve in this country.

[0]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/100615/4-cou...

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Inland_w...

[spywaregorilla]

Your first point is mostly just misleading. Yeah, we export a lot of food. We also import a lot of food. $147B for 2020, so almost dollar for dollar the same. It varies.

https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2021/08/05/food-availability-...

Your second point is way off. Food moves crazy distances. The last mile is critically important. The direct path from farm to table is pretty much irrelevant and you couldn't possibly use the waterways to solve this problem effectively in its entirety. People don't want to eat a ton of raw corn and soy.

Hunger is a problem, but it's a hard problem. Cost and nutrition and logistics do a weird dance. Many (most?) people suffering from food insecurity are also obese.

[QuarterReptile]

It's literally not a problem that the government can solve, because the government classifies people to whom it provides food as 'food insecure'. If the government provided unlimited credit for all those people to spend on food, they would still be classified 'food insecure.'

[notch656a]

Malnutrition death rate in the US is something like 1 per 100,000 per year. It's likely a large fraction of those are mentally ill people or neglected children.

While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.

[spywaregorilla]

Believe it or not, there is a middle ground between having enough to eat and dying of malnutrition

[refurb]

Yet the US has an obesity problem particularly among the poor.

Hmmm

[spywaregorilla]

Counter-intuitively, food insecurity makes you more likely to be obese.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584410/

> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.

[helloworld11]

Aside from grossly misdefining poverty by the U.S definition as "abject poverty" (it isn't even close and most certainly abject poverty doesn't apply to 18% of the U.S. population), your argument here boils down to. This factual accounting of a reduction in poverty doesn't fit with my completely arbitrary ideal of how much reduction I want to see by now, so it's "blowing sunshine up my ass". Huh?

As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.

Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.

[refurb]

Wait, what you call “abject” poverty decreased by 20% (relative) and you’re still not happy?

That’s fantastic news.