The Myths and Realities of Hunger in America

According to the Boston Globe, the Greater Boston Food Bank released a report yesterday that detailed the demographics of those who seek emergency food assistance. Here are some statistics that jumped out at me, both from the article and from the Food Bank’s website:

One third come from households with at least one working adult, and one fifth of seekers are themselves currently employed.
Only 6% receive traditional welfare payments
Half are from single parent households
11% are over 65, and 20% receive Social Security
One third come from families with children
The number of families seeking food aid has risen by 14% since 2001
16% are homeless (which means that 84% are not)
45% had to decide between food and heat
39% had to decide between food and rent
30% had to decide between food and medical care

And this in “Taxachusetts”, which spends more on welfare and social services than many other states, and is generally one of the wealthiest and best educated states in the country. And, in case you were curious, the food banks are forced to turn many people away because they simply don’t have enough to feed everyone that asks.

So, I think it is important to take the time to debunk some common myths about poverty:

One myth is that people are poor because they choose to be poor; that there are plenty of good paying jobs out there, and most of the poor are simply too lazy to go out and get them. Except that, according to these statistics, many of these people do have jobs and still cannot feed themselves regularly. Furthermore, many of them are of an age or a condition in which society has deemed it reasonable that they not work (which is really the whole point of Social Security). And that is besides the people who want to work but cannot.

There is the myth of the 1996 welfare law. Republicans, and many moderate Democrats, like to tout the effectiveness in that law of reducing the number of people on welfare, with the implication that no more needs to be done. And, in fact, there are very few people left on welfare. But hunger is still a massive problem (in Massachusetts, more than 1/12 of people sought food assistance last year). And if people cannot feed themselves, how can they be expected to work their way out of poverty, to save any money, or anything else?

There is the myth of compassionate conservatism. Since President Bush took office, the number of people seeking food assistance has risen sharply. Party of this will be the economic slowdown, which the President was not responsible for. But a lot of this increase will be because of the significantly tighter Medicaid eligibility requirements and the cut-backs to a number of entitlement programs. In fact, rather than balancing the budget by actually raising taxes or cutting military spending, or any other absurd sort of thing, the only fiscal restraint that the President has shown at all has been to propose even more cuts to the poor. Which will drive even more of them to seek food assistance more often. Notice that many of the poor are forced with horrible budgeting decisions about the relative value of food, utilities, health care, and rent. As it becomes harder to meet any of those others (the President has proposed even starker cuts to Medicaid and subsidized housing, for instance), food will lose out more often.

Finally, there is the myth among the religious community that the answer to poverty is personal responsibility and charity, and therefore we are justified in cutting back on social programs. These statistics plainly show, however, that even with current rates of charity AND current government programs, we still aren’t doing nearly enough to even help all of those people with jobs. Of course charity is a holy duty, and we should be doing more of it; in fact, an ideal society is one in which freely given charity is enough to take care of poverty completely. But, despite the increasing wealth of the church community, we aren’t doing nearly enough. And it is simply immoral to eliminate government programs until churches are ready to take up the slack of everyone that will lose assistance. We can’t (or more appropriately, are unwilling) to even deal with all the needs that the government is not currently meeting, so we shouldn’t be discouraging the government’s attempts to help.