Reply #12: I, too, found the lack of discussion on this topic

[Arkansas Granny]

to be a little strange. With all this talk about "ownership" and "personal responsiblilty" a lot of people have the feeling that if you can't take care of yourself and your family that it's somehow your own fault for being lazy, shiftless or irresponisble. Since the economy is "strong and getting stronger", what else could it be? We're adding jobs, unemployment is down. What's the problem?

What they don't see is that the unemployment rate doesn't count people who have dropped off the unemployment roles due to their benefits running out. The don't see the people who have taken jobs paying much less than the jobs that they had based their budget on. They don't see people trying to raise a family on minimum wage jobs. They want to pretend that hunger is something that happens only in third world countries. If they don't see it, they can ignore it, and it just doesn't exist.


The fact that chronic hunger exists in the richest country in the world is appalling. The fact that our government is pulling the safety net out from under the segment of our population who needs it most borders on criminal negligence.