The current shameful problem that children are starving in US America because they are poor is easily solved
Ending hunger in US America is easily solvable
Hunger in America was easily solvable 44 years ago when I published “Food Stamp Program, As It Is, Has Very Few Friends” in the NYT News of the Week section on April 18, 1976.
The current shameful problem that children are starving in US America because they are poor is easily solved.
Give poor families money. Not some money. A lot of money.
That year, I published two other pieces in The New York Times. One on my radiation treatment for cancer. The other, “The Sheep Squadron” described the US Labor Department certifying the importation of sheep herders from the Basque Region of Spain to herd sheep thousands of miles away in Idaho.
Bizarrely relevant to my country’s failure to feed children was “A New Lease on Life” my report on the worst of radiation treatment to cure a form of cancer largely and incorrectly regarded as a death sentence.
” I am 28 years old and I have cancer. Anger comes before anything else. There are times that the anger becomes overwhelming, turns to frustrated rage because there is no one to be angry at. I can curse God, which I’ve done many times, but it is unsatisfying because God doesn’t shout back. Crying helps.”
My experience with cancer combined (for want of a better word) with my expertise with The Politics of Food (title of my book in the subject) has made clear: Life is too valuable not to feed every human being on the planet (which we have the ability but not the will to do).
Even before my hair grew back at the hideously unattractive radiation caused bald spot at the back of my head, I published the following: “Supporters of these bills maintain that the hungry can best be served by taking those not truly poor off food stamps. They argue that the program, which now has no limit on the gross income that can be earned by recipients, is subject to abuse. They are particularly irked because about 5 percent of the recipients are students, whom they contend should not be eligible. ‘If Congress wants an income transfer system,’ one Congressional aide remarked, ‘it should have the opportunity to vote for one.’”
From my perspective 44 years later Congress should be ashamed of itself for not urgently sending money to the poor.
Then and only then:
#Eliminate food stamps.
#Stop spending an unnecessary fortune on a backdoor method of increasing the birth weight of infants through the cumbersome Women Infants and Children program.
#Provide our Native Americans living in desolation money rather than continuing to use a separate inefficient food distribution system.
# End food banks.
Wonderful as are the employess of food banks, supermarkets and grocery stores do a far more efficient job of distributing our country’s agricultural abundance.
Let me single out here Giant Foods at the shopping center in rural Lycoming County PA where abundance is mind numbing and which is the shopping destination of my electric wheel chair.
Trust me, there are very few Jews here in Williamsport PA, a town of 28,000. Yet, my Giant has a plentiful supply of borscht.
—30–
++++
Joel,Solkoff
jsolkoff@gmail.com
This is Part II of my Hate and Love The New York Times Series with appreciation to Catallus who wrote in circa 65 BC “Odi et Amo.”