If charity was the answer to our problems, then there would be no homelessness in America, no poverty in general. We would have a much better health care system and school systems that truly met the needs of children and society’s common good. But this is not the way that it is, much to the chagrin of Republicans.

The United States is a charitable nation, and as previously reported in Occasional Planet, Republicans are far more charitable than Democrats. But as our recent Occasional Planet public opinion survey shows, the issue is not that Democrats are stingy, rather it is that they see government as the best way to address problems like hunger.

Occasional Planet asked* a random sample of 550 Americans, “In your opinion, what is the best way to address hunger in America?”

Slightly more saw government assistance rather than charity as the preferable way to solve hunger, however nearly six in ten said that both avenues are of equal value. But as we break it down to various demographic or affiliation groups, we find a clear pattern.

You can see inside the red ellipse that Republicans are almost ten times as likely as Democrats to think that charity alone is the best way to address hunger in America. Inside the blue ellipse, we see that Democrats are about 2 ½ times as likely as Republicans to think that the best way to address the issue is through government assistance. On all counts, Independents expectedly fall in the middle.

Party affiliation involves a choice. But are demographic factors behind the party affiliations the cause of these differences? First a look at gender:

Even without the ellipses, you can see that the differences are negligible. What about race and ethnicity?

The differences between what Caucasians and minorities think is statistically insignificant.

When it comes to income level, we do see one significant difference:

Respondents who live in households with annual incomes of less than $50,000, have only about a third as much confidence in charity as those making over $50,000. This is particularly interesting because the “blue respondents” (those from households with incomes under $50,000 per year), are the very people who are frequently on the receiving end of both charity and government assistance. With only 7% of the blue respondents thinking that charity is the best way to address hunger, it is pretty clear that those who know best do not think that the job can be done best through charity alone.

So here is what we learned from this survey on addressing hunger in America:

1. Most Americans think that the way to address hunger in America is through a combination of charity and government assistance.
2. The people in our society who are the poorest and most likely to be recipients of charity and government assistance do not have very much confidence in the effectiveness of charity alone.
3. By a factor of ten, Republicans are more inclined to favor charity as the sole solution to hunger in America than Democrats are.
4. Perhaps most importantly, this may be why charitable giving by Republicans is greater than that of either Democrats in the United States or Europeans as a whole. However, the Democratic view that government assistance is a much better way to solve hunger than charity is very consistent with the strong support that Bernie Sanders has received in his presidential bid.

Bernie has touched many nerves in the electorate, and this survey clearly demonstrates that one of them is that his own party is much more supportive of government programs than with voluntary charity.

*Occasional Planet interviewed 550 Americans on January 14-15, 2016, using the services of the online-site Survey Monkey. The sample size is reliable +/- 4.5%, 95% of the time. It is demographically balanced by gender, ethnicity, age, income and geographic region.

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The public health crisis in the United States is typically illustrated with alarming obesity rates and images of super-sized fast food portions. However 50 million Americans, or one in four of the nation’s children, are food insecure, meaning that they do not always have access to healthy foods to sustain them throughout the day. The nation is caught in the crosshairs of obesity and food insecurity, and somehow we have managed to have both too much and too little food at the same time.

As Magnolia Pictures’ A Place at the Table points out, hunger in America is not actually caused by a food shortage. When most people think of hunger they think of utter starvation without realizing that the obesity problem that plagues their nation is another, albeit, different sign of hunger. In the United States, the problem is not that the next meal never comes, but that the meal is often full of a lot of empty calories. Thus food insecurity and obesity are linked because nutritionally weak and high-caloric foods, such as French fries or potato chips, offer the most caloric bang for the buck.

Undoubtedly, children are hit hardest by the plague of food insecurity in the United States. Nutrition deprivation for children under the age of three are at risk for limiting their physical and mental potential as undernutrition in these children can lead to reduced cognition and increased susceptibility to infectious diseases. And regardless of greater school funding and pressure on teachers to improve students’ performance, a hungry child may struggle to focus and succeed in their classes regardless of change in education policy. A nation is only as strong as its youth and hunger is ultimately weakening this nation.

Despite its relative lack of attention, hunger is not a new issue in America. A 1968 CBS documentary, Hunger in America, highlighted the fact that hunger is a basic human need and should also be a human right. The documentary inspired Americans to demand action. Policy makers listened and passed legislation to expand the Food Stamp program, an elderly feeding program, and a the school breakfast program. Regular Americans rose to the challenge and demanded a solution and hunger was greatly eradicated by the end of the 1970s.

However, that success was short-lived. A Place at the Table explains that The 1980s and 90s brought a different public sentiment regarding food insecurity and the  issue of hunger in America shifted from being a public problem to a private problem as we began to rely on charities and churches to provide for the hungry. But charity food banks are not sustainable enough for long-term assistance, as they are intended to provide emergency support rather than chronic usage. People should not be forced to rely on these food banks for their day-to-day needs as charities cannot eradicate systemic hunger as they struggle to provide foods of significant nutritional value.

A Place at the Table also discusses how the price of produce has gone up since the 1980s while processed foods have remained cheap largely due to the agricultural subsidies that go to corn and wheat and largely ignore fruits, vegetables, and meat. These subsidies, which totaled $26 billion in 2000, are outdated as they date back to the Great Depression. FDR passed the Agriculture Adjustment Act in 1933 to provide emergency relief for families who risked losing their farms by purchasing their excess grain. But now the farming industry in America has changed, and consolidated and profitable corporations now dominate the agricultural landscape and have much less need for financial assistance. As the purpose of the current subsidy is no longer relevant, the film implies that America should consider making nutritious foods more affordable rather than focusing on corn and wheat production.

We need to tell our senators and representatives that if they are not with us on hunger, then we will not be with them for reelection. The problems in America are often unsolved due to political inaction and the bickering between blue and red ideology. But unlike many of the current hotly debated issues in congress, keeping our children properly fed is a bipartisan issue. Unfortunately food insecurity does not get the same level of media coverage as the nation’s more contentious issues. But as we have learned from the anti-hunger campaigns in the 1970s, the public can rise up, influence legislators, and ultimately alleviate or eliminate food insecurity in America. Now is the time to act.

Fir more information on how to fight food insecurity, text  the word “food” to 77177 or visit A Place at the Table’s action center at http://actioncenter.takepart.com/apatt.

Image credit: http://candychang.com/food-insecurity-poster/

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America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, where people who work hard can create wealth and security for themselves and their families. Yet, the startling rise of families living in poverty challenges this treasured American myth. Leo Hindery, Jr., Chairman of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative of the New America Foundation, feels the Obama administration is not paying enough attention to what he calls a “pandemic of poverty” sweeping the nation.  His article describing this disaster, “America’s Dirty Little Secret:  Who’s Really Poor in America” can be found here.

The statistics Hindery offers are shocking:

• At least 50 million people are ill-fed — up from 37 million just a year ago — including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions — the very large 15-state ‘South’ being one of them — where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.
• 30% of the nation’s 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011.
• Despite the truly dismal ‘real unemployment’ figures with which most everyone now agrees — a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force — very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of-school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation’s 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 — an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 — which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.
• And 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population, are at or below “200% of the federal poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four,” which is a needs-measure made lame by the fact that no family of four can actually comfortably live on such a low annual income.

Hindery feels the best response to this sobering reality is to adopt FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights” that would guarantee every person, in addition to education and health care:

• “a job with a living wage. . . .that would earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing  and recreation;
• “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;”
• “and a decent home.”

FDR wanted to create a socialist democracy, a regulated market economy, which would provide a basic standard of living for every citizen. He sought equality in the pursuit of happiness and believed individual freedom requires economic security. But a socialist democracy that spreads the wealth and insures the basic well being of all its citizens, flies in the face of the individualist American fantasy of becoming wealthy and powerful. For the many who still live in this fantasy world, a socialist democracy would curtail personal economic freedom and that chance to “make it big.” But in reality, although a small percentage of Americans have amassed large sums of money, the vast majority never will. In our current fantasy-based “free market” economy, a shocking number of us cannot even afford basic needs. And a country without a stable middle class effectively kills opportunity for all, except for the financial and corporate elite.

Until we Americans collectively shed our economic myths and fantasies, we will not be able to grow and mature as a nation.  A mature citizenry, in my opinion, would embrace the wisdom of FDR’s economic bill of rights. It was a great idea when he introduced it in January 1944, and it remains a great idea today.

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