Disclaimer: Poverty is not really all that bad, is it?

What follows is taken directly from the Heritage Foundation website. You can find it yourself by calling up a list of all issues coverend by the Heritage Foundation and under Welfare Reform it will list Poverty and Inequality. This is just the disclaimer. It was clearly not enough for the Heritage Folks to claim that poverty is "more limited in scope and severity than one might think." No, they then list a series of articles and lectures published over the past few years, each with some other bombastic claim:

Performance Based Pay is Driving Increase in Inequality and that claims of growing hunger in the U.S. are wildly exaggerated... Published in 2004, the paper intended to discredit the reality of hunger experienced daily by millions of Americans has been proven wrong, year after year as hunger and poverty continued to increase. Now who's exaggerating?

Poverty & Inequality: "ISSUES > Welfare > Poverty & Inequality

Poverty and Inequality

For most Americans, the word poverty suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food , clothing, and reasonable shelter. Advocates of the welfare state often urge large expansions of welfare spending to combat allegedly widespread poverty in America, yet only a small portion of the 37 million persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is much more limited in scope and severity than one might imagine." ~ The Heritage Foundation

How the Democrats Got Religion

Thursday, Jul. 12, 2007 By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY

A President has to be a preacher of sorts, instructing, consoling, summoning citizens to sacrifice for some common good. But candidates are competitors, which means they seldom manage to talk about faith in a way that doesn't disturb people, doesn't divide them, doesn't nail campaign posters on the gates of heaven. Republicans have been charged with exploiting religious voters, Democrats with ignoring them: Hillary Clinton's voice gets tight as she recalls the mocking response she received when she first spoke in spiritual terms about the longing that people felt to invest in causes larger than self-interest. "I talked about my faith years ago and was pilloried for it," she says, and it is hard to tell if she is more impatient with the conservatives who presumed they held the patent on piety or with the liberals whose worship of diversity all but excluded the devout. Read this recent article in Time Magazine (full article)

Hunger or Very Low Food Security? You decide.

I am posting this because it is an excellent article on hunger in the United States.This year, the US Deaprtment of Agriculture stoped using the word hunger and replaced it with the term "very low food security" to describe the 35 million people who live in homes that struggle to put food on the table. The story was covered in major papers nationwide, but Time has a great job covering the issue and it is worth the read. It is sad that political interests often prevail, even against the interests of hungry children. I hate to think that in difficult political times the best we can do is push the burden of high national debt fueld by tax breaks for the wealthy onto the backs of the poor, as if we are an "everyone for themselves" country with no sense of responsibility or community.

Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006
What It Means to Go Hungry

A controversial new government report has excised the term "hunger" altogether in favor of more supposedly accurate measurements. But sometimes words have a power that statistics do not.

By NANCY GIBBS
Since Thanksgiving is the day we count our blessings instead of our carbs, it is a ripe moment to talk about hunger. Or perhaps, to talk about how we talk about hunger. When the government released its annual survey on Household Food Security in the United States last week, as it has every year since 1995, there was for the first time a word missing — a very important word. The report stated that about 35 million Americans sometimes don't always know where their next meal will come from, and a third of those sometimes experience "very low food security." But as of this year, the word "hunger" no longer applies.

The complete article can be found TIME.com Click here for the rest of the story.