Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [59]
What’s more, there is hunger in America.
“Hunger here?” The Dutch reporter interviewing me looked puzzled. “There can’t be. I’ve never seen anything like your supermarkets. So much food. So many different kinds.”
But I have learned that hunger can exist anywhere, within any society that has not accepted the fundamental responsibility of providing for the basic needs of its most vulnerable members—those unable to meet their own needs. And ours, sadly, is such a society. I found myself feeling ashamed when I learned that other societies with which we might compare ourselves—France, Sweden, West Germany—demonstrate by their welfare programs that they do accept this social responsibility. In a recent study of social benefits to needy families with children in eight major industrial countries, the United States ranked among the lowest. In France, a single, unemployed mother caring for two children would receive in benefits 78 percent of the average wage of that country. In Sweden, 94 percent. But in the United States she would receive only 54 percent—and in many parts of our country, much less.14 (While benefits in other countries are uniform, in our system a person living in the South is likely to get as little as half the benefits of someone living in the Northeast, for example.)
Despite our staggering abundance, millions live in utter deprivation. Who are those denied access to America’s abundance?
They are the elderly. Fifteen percent have incomes below the poverty line, and that percentage has begun to climb.15 Forty percent of all unmarried elderly women in the United States live in poverty.16
They are children, and the mothers who must stay home to take care of them. Twelve million American children live below the poverty line, and poverty among inner-city children is climbing at a horrifying rate: between 1969 and 1975 poverty among related children under five rose, for example, 68 percent in Ohio and 49 percent in New Jersey.17
They are the disabled and those unable to find work. By the late 1970s, Americans were being asked to accept as normal an unemployment rate double that of a decade earlier.
In addition to the people who cannot work or cannot find a job, there are many Americans trying to support a family on the money they earn working for the minimum wage. You can work full-time for the minimum wage and still fall below the poverty line.
All told, 29 million Americans—about one in eight of us—live below the poverty line, which the government sets at about $8,400 for a family of four.18 Poverty-line income amounts to $583 a month, but family incomes of $300 to $400 are more typical. To grasp how there can be hunger and other needless deprivation in our country, all I have to do is try to imagine meeting the needs of myself and my two children on $400 a month.
Many would like to deny that hunger and poverty exist in America. Just after Ronald Reagan’s election as President, his chief adviser on domestic affairs declared that poverty had been “virtually wiped out in the United States.” Since our system of government aid had been a “brilliant success,” he added, it “should now be dismantled.”19 What irresponsible ignorance.
First, our welfare programs do not lift people out of poverty. Even including food stamp benefits, in few states does welfare bring families even up to the poverty line.20 In half the states these programs do not bring families even to 75 percent of the poverty standard.21 The second fallacy in this statement is that there could ever be a time when government welfare programs are no longer needed. This attitude reflects an unwillingness to accept responsibility for those who—in any society—cannot care for themselves, no matter how bright the economy looks.
But what about hunger? Even though poverty cannot be denied, haven’t food stamps eliminated hunger? There is no doubt that food stamps have helped enormously, but they have not eliminated hunger. First, food stamps