Hungry Like A Wolf

posted by The Sailor @ 6:02 PM Permalink

USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.

America is hungry and getting hungrier, with 49 million people - 17 million of them children - last year unable to consistently get enough food to eat, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

These figures represent 14.6 percent of all households, a 3.5-percentage-point jump over 2007, and they are the largest recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

Of those 49 million, 12 million adults and 5.2 million children reported experiencing the country's most severe hunger, possibly going days without eating. Among the children, nearly half a million in the developmentally critical years under age 6 were going hungry. That's three times the number in 2006.

The study documented both "low food security," which describes people unable to consistently get enough to eat, and "very low food security," in which people reported being hungry various times over the year but were unable to eat because there wasn't enough money for food.

I'm just going to bypass any argument about adults going hungry, because we all know they just brought in on themselves, all those white collar people who now go on welfare are just lazy.[/snark] [Editor's Note: I felt compelled to add the 'snark' tag because things are just so damn crazy that The Onion articles can't even begin to approach reality as seen thru GOP whiteout goggles.]

So I'll cry out the constant republican theme, What About The Children! Seriously, why does any child in America, or the rest of the world, go hungry?

There is no excuse, we have the food, we have the means of distribution, what we lack is adults in charge to make this happen.

Addendum:

Texas ranks second-worst in hunger risk, U.S. says

[...]
[Jan Pruitt, president and chief executive officer of the North Texas Food Bank] we're seeing a lot more professional people now."

Outreach workers who help people sign up for food stamps recently met a man who lost his job when Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS.

"He was an engineer – he made $100,000 a year ago," Pruitt said. "But he lost his job, his house and his savings, and now he's on food stamps."
[...]
"And Texas does lead the nation in the number of food-insecure children," Pruitt said.

"Every fifth child in Texas is in a food-insecure household," she said. "Every fourth child in Dallas County lives in poverty. And every third child in the city of Dallas lives in poverty."

I really don't have anything else to say, the facts speak for themselves.




Cross posted at SteveAudio

Labels: America, hunger, texas