[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.

[notch656a]

The study you cite shows that "food insecurity" is associated with obesity. Not that it causes obesity.

Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”

By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.

I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.

Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.

[refurb]

So people who are "food insecure" end up eating too much food and becoming obese?

How does that work?