Foodstamps

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

@Gae Bolga

Are you being sarcastic or am I missing something?

Boru

Missing something.  What alot of people miss, really.  

We deal with our problems like we deal with strippers.  If you throw enough money at them, they'll stop nagging you.  Also like strippers, no matter how much money we throw at it, it doesn't actually go away.  It's still there, hitting up the next john (in this case, to the tune of many, many millions).  From industry subsidy to direct assistance, the dollar amount we spend on the problem of hunger is worth more than all of the food required to solve the problem of hunger.

-and yet.....

Hunger is not due to an inability to produce.  Hunger is not due to an insurmountable cost.  Hunger, is a human problem.  This is especially true in the US, and any developed nation, but broadly true of global hunger as well.  

Ultimately, hunger exists in the US (I'll stick to just this one little piece of rock for now) as an artifact of why we get a $1.70 for every dollar we throw at the problem.  Our programs are designed to create economic value - not feed people.  Food stamps are not actually for the starving poor, but for hungry producers and retailers (and, ofc, for exotic financial instruments ostensibly based on the value of agricultural commodities.).  The programs remain under the farm bill for a reason.  It doesn't actually matter that products sit (and go bad) on the shelves...because the the monetary value of the vouchers that the poor use to acquire them are paid out to distributors regardless of whether or not anyone cashes them in - and the volume that moves assumes metrics that include projections concerning private and public buyers.

A person would have to try, hard, to come up with a sillier system.  Which is also why we need the excuses that you hear from the pro-starving camps in the US.  That the poor are lazy and don't deserve assistance...that they'd just waste it on water bugs.  Our propaganda surrounding hunger is fucking ridiculous...because our hunger problem is fucking ridiculous.

As of today, the main effective use of the totality of our assistance program is as an accounting trick to hide grift, production inefficiency, and (even worse than we acknowledge) poverty.  Perhaps even more hilarious, is that while all of this is going on..enough food is already bought, and then rots in landfills...just in the US, to feed every hungry person in the US with plenty to spare for hungry people in any handfull of a number of other countries.  We're a country that increased our yields from 10-20 bushels just a few decades ago to 120 plus today - it's worth remembering.  

Instead, it sits there dumping methane and carbon into the atmosphere.  Doubleplus good!!!

Well, that was an education and no mistake.  Puts me in mind of the English moving shiploads of food out of Ireland after the potato crop failed.

Boru