Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I call BS

Some 691,000 children went hungry in the U.S. sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.


If by sometime you mean there were no Pop Tarts in the cupboard this morning. I'll cop to that.

If by struggling you mean, "What? I have to do something for food?" I'd believe that too.

With the plethora of government, private, and religious organizations in this country, if you or your kids go to bed hungry tonight...
It's your own damn fault.

Posted by daddyquatro at 4:32 AM

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4 comments:

  1. In this country one of the main causes of health problems in the poor is obesity.
    ReplyDelete
  2. D4, you're exactly right. All these agencies have vested interests in not seeing the problems they're tasked with fixing get solved. If they admitted that they'd solved them, they'd have to admit that they didn't need nay further money to work on the problems. It's why we still have so much "poverty" in the country--they've defined "poverty" as whatever condition the x% (what is it, 10? 12?) of lowest wage-earners in the country are in. Voila, poor people with cares, microwaves, and color TVs!
    ReplyDelete
  3. A beauracracy, once established, will justify its continued existence forever. It's the nature of the beast. If that requires defining poverty up, then that is what will be done. If it requires creation of a "new" crisis, then that is what will be done.

    A beauracracy in self-preservation mode is an ugly thing to see, indeed. Better to end its misery quickly, cleanly. Now, if we just had someone with the cajones to ...

    I dream.
    ReplyDelete
  4. I first learned this lesson my sophomore year of high school in Beginning Debate, when the topic was Homelessness. Every advocacy group and most media outlets repeated, citing multiple sources with authority, that there were about 3 million homeless people in the United States. But when you did a little research and drilled down, every single one of those sources derived from just one person - a homeless advocate named Mitch Snyder who testified before Congress in 1982 the results of a study that was later discredited. He later admitted to fully making the number up out of whole cloth. The 1990 census, the first to do a full scale "find 'em and count 'em" study, could only find about 250,000. Still a problem, but 1/12 of the problem advocates claimed. Of course, that was far more about attacking Ronald Reagan than addressing the homeless issue, but then, that's no surprise to anyone.

    The more things "Change"...
    ReplyDelete

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