Mark Twain's _The War Prayer_

The Challenge

Living on Food Stamps. Sometimes there's a lot of month left at the end of the money. Many researchers now refer not to hunger, but to “food insecurity,” defined by the Census Bureau as “not always having access to enough food to meet basic needs.” It is widespread. The USDA estimated that more than 35 million Americans lived in food insecure households in 2005, which were insecure on average for six months during the year. According to Second Harvest, a national network of emergency food providers, in 2005 over 25 million Americans used a soup kitchen (which provide eat-in prepared meals), a food pantry (which provide bags of free groceries to take home), or ate in a shelter supplied by their food distributors over the course of the year. That’s about 4 million separate people in any given week; at least 9 percent of the population that couldn’t afford food. It’s almost 15 percent in big cities. About one-third were children, and 11 percent were elderly. One-third of the non-elderly adults in need were employed at the time of their survey, and about half of all food recipients had income above 130 percent of the poverty line, making them poor enough to need help but probably not poor enough to qualify for food stamps. About one-third did receive food stamps (although nationwide only about half of all those who are eligible actually receive them; in some cities it’s as low as one in four), but they reported that their monthly supply lasted only about 2.5 weeks

Insanely Cool

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait

(hat tip Daily Dish)

No Better than Ezra

You're on your own, unless you're among the educated elite:

I tend to think it's easier to not see the lack of mandatory paid vacation and holiday as much of a problem if you're a highly educated, white collar worker, and even easier if you're a stay-at-home, freelance writer. It will simply never be true for you that the minimum is your reality.

But that doesn't mean it's not true for others. According to the CEPR study (pdf), about a quarter of workers don't get any paid vacation or holidays. If you make less than $15 an hour, that number jumps to 31%. If you do get paid vacation, on average, you get 12 days of it a year. That's less than the statutory minimum in every advanced country save Japan and Canada, and I'd bet the average in both countries well outpaces the average here.

And it's not just vacation days. Nearly half of all private sector workers get no paid sick days. In the bottom quarter of US workers, 80% are deprived -- and this is exactly the group that can't afford to take an unpaid sick day. And so far as family values go, only one in three workers has paid sick days they can use to care for ill children.

Fallwell's Dead

Here's his legacy, from The Navy Times:

Navy veteran David Miller said that when he checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Iowa City, he didn’t realize he would get a hard sell for Christian fundamentalism along with treatment for his kidney stones.

Miller, 46, an Orthodox Jew, said he was repeatedly proselytized by hospital chaplains and staff in attempts to convert him to Christianity during three hospitalizations over the past two years.

He said he went hungry each time because the hospital wouldn’t serve him kosher food, and the staff refused to contact his rabbi, who could have brought him something to eat.

There more.

The Poverty Business

The poor pay more:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Read the rest.

Yowza

Go play the clip HERE. You heard me, go. . . . . .

Homeless People Count

A terrific new report from Picture the Homeless. Get it HERE