Breadline USA: Why People Are Going Hungry in the Land of Plenty

Breadline USA: Why People Are Going Hungry in the Land of Plenty

By Sasha Abramsky, PoliPoint Press. Posted July 4, 2009.

America’s poor are being priced out of a market flush with excess eatables. It’s an abomination we can fix.

When the Month is Longer Than the Money

Billy MacPherson believed that for many of her friends and pantry clientele “the months are longer than the money.” What little income they brought in each month— from work, from Social Security or disability checks, in food stamps or welfare payments— was never quite enough to last a full four-plus weeks. And so they faced an unpalatable choice: try to stretch the family budget to cover the whole month, which involved scrimping on food and missing meals throughout the entire period, or eat semi-decently for the first two or three weeks of the month and pray that something, somehow, would come about to tide them through the lean times at the end.

Once gas prices started going up, food prices also headed north— at least in part because so much corn and arable land was diverted into biofuel production in response to the energy crunch; in part, too, because oil-based fertilizers soared in price and inflation took root throughout the broader economy. In the last years of George W. Bush’s presidency, that lean period at the end of each month began to grow. Instead of a few days, it became a week; then it became ten days, even two weeks. For low-income Americans, wages and government checks lagged far behind inflation, leaving them little choice but to watch as month after month their never particularly munificent purchasing power collapsed.

via Breadline USA: Why People Are Going Hungry in the Land of Plenty | Politics | AlterNet.