Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/13/6-8-million-teens-tweens-are.html
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Countdown to victim blaming in 3,2,1…
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If only those kids had chosen to be born to wealthier parents - like Trump did!
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Universal basic income.
Universal health care.
Make it nearly impossible for people to go broke to the point of starvation, and everyone will benefit.
To paraphrase a famous quotation: I would rather ten scammers abuse the system than for one child to go hungry.
And, on a darkly ironic note, as the USA is widely considered a “Christian” nation…
And they’ll know we are Christians
By our love, by our love
Yes, they’ll know we are Christians
By our love…
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Isn’t this one of those “horseman of the apocalypse” type indicators?
You know, famine?
This reminds me: there are no natural disasters. Only man made ones, either through neglect or shortsightedness.
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Some key things that are lost in the Guardian article’s prose which gets focuses on the crime and politics involved.
There are 41.7 million teenagers (aged 10-19) by census estimates. There are 6.8 million teens between 10 and 17 that are not sure if they will be able to feed themselves. That means there is a minimum of around 1 in 6 teenagers living a life where they have to resort to anything to get food.
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And that’s only going to get worse as more of california turns to sand.
Something like 50% of the fresh produce in the US comes from that region, after all.
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Nonsense. Lazy fucks, all of them. They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They live in the greatest country on the planet after all. Just live the American Dream … dishwashers are needed everywhere!
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You keep using that word “Christian”, I do not think it means what you think it means
The standard GOP answer to everything!
Too bad it doesn’t mention the part about the rich tilting the board away from everyone else.
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As of 2014, 70.6% of Americans identify as Christian. So I think it’s not out of the question that the U.S. could be considered a “Christian nation.”
But yes, I think that either I have a mistaken impression about what “being Christian” should entail, or a disturbingly large number of Christians do.
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According to many adherents of the “prosperity gospel” material wealth is God’s reward to them, so it’s a convenient way to look down on the poor for simply not believing hard enough.
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I’m a huge fan of the Urban Institute, and this is a valuable study. But the Guardian story is a textbook illustration of the mainstream media’s inability to accurately report scientific results. Instances of transactional sex are reported in the results of a qualitative study. It is not a quantitative study. That is, this study does not necessarily demonstrate that transactional sex exists among US teens. It demonstrates that some US teens, especially low-income teens, believe that transactional sex exists. That is an important finding, but it is not the same thing as quantifying the existence of transactional sex among US teens.
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I wonder if we’re doing a disservice to this whole issue by using the term “food insecurity”. It’s 6 syllables, and it sounds more clinical and dispassionate that the previous (and fewer syllable’d) term that I was more familiar with, namely “chronic hunger”. Kind of the way “shell shock” morphed over the years into battle fatigue, then operational exhaustion, then post traumatic stress disorder (nod to George Carlin for highlighting this)… every juncture making the term more clinical, and drawing less of a visceral reaction. “Food insecurity” sounds like it might include people who are neurotic; “chronic hunger” sounds to me like the pain of not having enough food.
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Based on what I know about Jesus, the "Christians"in the US are about as far from what he taught as you can get. They name drop all the time to get into Heaven, but don’t give a rat’s ass about actually living and doing what he taught.
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So, you think this is fundamentally a problem with the aggregate food supply in America?
Interesting…
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I don’t think the wikipedia article is comprehensive enough. Especially the History and Theology part does not go far enough and just focuses on US-American developments. The basics for “prosperity theology” are found much earlier in Calvinism.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think you’ll like it:
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It does fit…which is sad.
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cough I think you missed my point: Food prices spike, fewer people can afford decent nutrition, more children go hungry because there’s even less to go around.
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Oh, so as the aggregate food supply declines, the market-clearing equilibrium will dramatically rise, pricing children out of the food market. Ergo, hunger.
Gotta say, that’s an… unusual… proposition in American agricultural economics.
