Subscribe"Now compare this list with the unemployed miner’s budget that I gave earlier. The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread."-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Child Hunger Facts - • In 2004 over 13.8 million, or 19.0%, of American children resided in food insecure households, meaning they were hungry or at risk of hunger. Over a half-million children lived in food insecure households with hungerNote the numbers who live with hunger.
Hunger in the Suburbs - What the rebounding economy and the dramatic declines in welfare participation have not accomplished is any significant decline in hunger or poverty. In 2004, the prevalence of household food insecurity was 9.0 percent (4.1 million households), and the prevalence of food insecurity with hunger was 2.8 percent (1.3 million households) [i]. [my emphasis]
Senior Hunger
* 25 percent of client households with seniors (no children) indicated that they have had to choose between food and medical care and 30 percent had to choose between food and paying for heat/utilities.
* 6.5 percent of households with an elderly person are food insecure. Over 460,000 of those households experienced food insecurity with hunger during 2004 [ii].
* Elderly households are much less likely to receive food stamps than non-elderly households, even when expected benefits are roughly the same [v].
Here's a rough (and reasonably certain) picture of what has happened: the standard of living of the poorest 10 percent of American families is significantly lower today than it was a generation ago. Families in the middle are, at best, slightly better off. Only the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans have achieved income growth anything like the rates nearly everyone experience between the 40's and early 70's. Meanwhile the income of families high in the distribution has risen dramatically with something like a doubling of real incomes of the top 1%.Why has this happened? Krugman suggests that it may be a result of changes in technology and trade.
The most intuitive way to see the extent of intergenerational mobility is to see where children from the most or least affluent families end up in the earnings or income distribution as adults. This can be shown by a transition matrix showing movements in the income distribution across generations.So for the two most extreme cases, the difference in death rates is 250 people per 100,000! One quarter of one percent of the population!
One measure of income inequality is the ratio of income received by the 20% of families with the highest after-tax income compared with the 20% of families with the lowest after-tax income.To me, as a Canadian, the natural question is, why isn't the US do something similar? But Canadians don't have the same level of distrust of their government as Americans do. To a large number of Americans, living without a social safety net appears to be better than living with a social safety net provided by a more powerful and intrusive state.
In 2003, for market income, this ratio was about 12.9 to 1.0. That is, the 20% of families with the highest after-tax income received about $12.90 in market income for every $1.00 received by the 20% of families with the lowest after-tax income.
However, taxes and transfers moderate the differences between the quintiles of the income distribution. After taxes and transfers, the one-fifth of families with the highest after-tax income received $5.50 for every $1.00 received by the one-fifth with the lowest.
When the student turns from the university as the pretended source of truth and experiences it as one social institution among many, he comes face to face with another gap between pretense and reality. Social institutions pretend to serve the individual, and the university even pretends to do so in loco parentis. However, for whatever services they render, they exact a price, which, in turn, impairs or even negates the services themselves. Social institutions, in the measure that they are mechanized and bureaucratized, diminish the individual, who must rely upon others rather than himself for the satisfaction of his wants, from the necessities of life to his spiritual and philosophic longings. What he once controlled himself others now control, and in the measure that they do, they diminish his freedom.Besides, a strong welfare state in Canada hasn't eliminated the existence of an underclass, so it's not like we've managed to cure the problem. (My commute to and from work takes me pretty close to the Downtown East Side in Vancouver, the poorest postal code in Canada.)
Thus, modern society suffers from a profound ambivalence. It pretends to take care of needs that formerly the individual had to struggle to take care of himself, and to a high degree it lives up to that pretense. Yet the institution that takes care of man's needs also has the power to withhold that care. If it does, the individual's needs are left without care, in so far as he has no alternative means to satisfy them through his own individual efforts; and the sphere in which such individual efforts can be effective has been reduced by the mechanization and bureaucratization of social institutions below the minimum necessary for the satisfaction of the individual's elemental needs. In a word, the individual, to a high and unprecedented degree, is at the mercy of the institutions established for the purpose of meeting his needs.
... The first of these classes consists of the wealthy- the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and the third is composed of those who have little or no property and who subsist by the work that they perform for the two superior orders. ...
It is evident that each of these classes will exercise an influence peculiar to its own instincts upon the administration of the finances of the state. If the first of the three exclusively possesses the legislative power, it is probable that it will not be sparing of the public funds, because the taxes which are levied on a large fortune only diminish the sum of superfluities and are, in fact, but little felt. If the second class has the power of making the laws, it will certainly not be lavish of taxes, because nothing is so onerous as a large impost levied upon a small income. The government of the middle classes appears to me the most economical, I will not say the most enlightened, and certainly not the most generous, of free governments.
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Lame post. No apologies.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:55 AM on February 19, 2006