While many organizations are inconvenienced, unable to plan or budget due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget by the start of this year (October 1), the limbo is literally killing individuals who depend on that funding. What isn't said is that federal budgets assume that the price of food is the same today as it was in 1989 when the guidelines were written.
It's part of the psychology that tells us "Inflation rose at a modest rate of 2% last month, excluding the volatile food and energy components." In other words, the rate of inflation experienced by corporations may have been 2%, and that experienced by individuals more like 20%, but you'd never know from those numbers.
The exclusion makes sense if food prices shoot up and down, averaging zero change. The exclusion sabotages the truth if food prices, gas prices, and heating oil prices just keep going up. With oil passing $88 a barrel yesterday, it's not clear how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people are not going to be able to afford heat this winter.
Maybe, Congress is unaware of the "hybrid" or fractal quality of this set of numbers as well, hiding the pain individuals feel from the comfort of on high. It seems that way from below. See Hybrid Images and Hybrid Reality. It would be a different kind of tragedy if the government is not responding because it actually appears to sincere people who would care if they knew that there is nothing important to care about. My "hybrid" posts discuss that possibility.
Certainly other guidelines to policy, such as the Gross Domestic Product, completely mask damaging actions and count spending our nations resources as "income" with no corresponding charge against "assets". (See Genuine Progress Indicator( Canada) :
GDP-based measures were never meant to be used as a measure of progress, as they are today. In fact, activities that degrade our quality of life, like crime, pollution, and addictive gambling, all make the economy grow. The more fish we sell and the more trees we cut down, the more the economy grows. Working longer hours makes the economy grow. And the economy can grow even if inequality and poverty increase.
The more rapidly we deplete our natural resources and the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the economy grows. Because we assign no value to our natural capital, we actually count its depreciation as gain, like a factory owner selling off his machinery and counting it as profit.
and the US "Redefining progress", Wikipedia on the Genuine Progress Indicator with a link to the one article that is a must read if you can only read one. (But you need a subscription or to go to the library to get it.)
"If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?" by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe. Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, pp. 59-78.
Also see: Wake Up, the American Dream is over, Guardian, June 8, 2006:
Even America's richest think they're getting too many tax breaks from a government determined to keep the poor in their place. As poverty in the US grows, Paul Harris wonders what happened to the Land of Opportunity
This flawed accounting is like your child suddenly discovering that they can buy things on your credit card or their cell phone without having to "pay anything" and going on a spree. The result of that flawed perception, as we've demonstrated in our Systems Dynamics class, is that things just look just great, better than normal in fact, in a climbing curve until they abruptly hit the limit when it crashes to zero. This is what happened to the Georges Bank, once the best fishing in the world off Cape Cod, now an underground desert and junk yard.
People only respond to things they see, that seem real to them.
Supplies Dwindle at Food Pantries as Financing Bill Stalls in Washington New York Times Oct 18, 2007. by Winter Miller. emphasis added.
On a recent weekday at the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of Brooklyn’s largest food pantries, shelves that are usually piled high with staples like rice and canned meats were empty, a stark illustration of the crisis facing emergency food providers across the city.
The Brooklyn organization is among about 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens supplied by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest distributor of free food in the city, whose mission has been crippled by what officials describe as its worst food shortage in years.
At its sprawling warehouse in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, the Food Bank is storing about half what it housed in recent years....
“It’s the first time in a few years that I could walk into the warehouse and see empty shelves,” said Lucy Cabrera, the president and chief executive of the Food Bank, which helps feed about 1.3 million people a year.
Officials at the Food Bank say the bare shelves stem from a steady decline in federal emergency food aid, though a farm bill stalled in the United States Senate could increase that aid.
According to a study to be released today by the Food Bank and Cornell University, New York City receives a little more than half the amount of emergency food annually from the federal government that it did three years ago. The shortfall is occurring as the number of families and individuals relying on soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City has risen to 1.3 million from 1 million since 2004.
The problem besetting the citywide Food Bank is also affecting providers of emergency food nationwide who are supplied by America’s Second Harvest, the country’s largest hunger relief organization, which assists 50,000 providers. Federal food donations to food banks have been stagnant since 2002.
But organizations have been hit hardest by declines in a separate federal program that buys excess crops like peaches and potatoes from farmers and then donates them to food banks. Those donations have shrunk to 89 million pounds last year from 251 million pounds in 2003.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, says he is optimistic that the farm bill will pass within the next month. He said the delay involved sections of the bill unrelated to the nutrition portion.
Separately, the House of Representatives voted in July to increase the budget for food stamps and other nutrition programs by $4 billion, which would include an increase in emergency food assistance to $250 million from $140 million. It also would require an automatic increase in food assistance based on the rate of inflation, addressing one of the reasons food banks are now struggling.
“It’s devastating,” said the Rev. Melony Samuels, a minister at the Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith who oversees the food pantry. “It has gotten so bad.”
In better times, the pantry might get 190 cases of assorted foods every week; now the shipments are much smaller. One recent week, all it got was six cases of peanut butter and pasta.
“In order to keep food on our shelves, we need to roll in $5,000 per month easily, and you’re looking at half or less of that coming in,” Ms. Samuels said, adding that she might not be able to stock her pantry with turkeys for Thanksgiving.
See also: Flash, US Solves World Hunger
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; A01The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."
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