
Photos Show the Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America - save_ferris
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-the-staggering-food-bank-lines-across-america/
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kwhitefoot
Can someone explain this to us on the other side of the Atlantic? I mean, seen
from Norway it looks totally insane.

How can such a large proportion of people be so financially insecure that a
couple of weeks unemployment means that they are going hungry in the
wealthiest country in the world?

~~~
sendbitcoins
Rents are high, wages are low.

Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure, but we
sure could make housing cheaper.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Figures I found for 2017 say US median household rent is about 1 kUSD and
median income about 3.6 kUSD. That doesn't sound too bad to me (seen from
Norway where 1 kUSD gets you a one bedroom flat or less) so I presume that
there must be important details not revealed in the averages. I got the
figures from

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States)

and

[https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/](https://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/)

Is it that the median figures hide a lot of people earning less and paying
more rent? That is, inequality is the problem rather than the averages.

> Can't do much about wages because they are subject to global pressure,

Surely a lot of the low paid workers are in service industries; how are they
subject to global pressure? It's not as if a restaurant can employ cheap
Vietnamese labour.

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yeezul
Lot's of what we (most other first world countries) take for granted is not
present in the US.

Health care insurance for example can eat a good chunk of that 3.6kUSD: the
average cost of individual health insurance premiums is $440 for an individual
and &1,168 for a family, in 2018 according to eHealth [1]

1: [https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/individual-and-
fa...](https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/individual-and-family/how-
much-does-individual-health-insurance-cost)

~~~
kwhitefoot
> and &1,168 for a family

Ouch!

That makes health insurance behave like a very regressive tax.

In contrast in Germany where they have compulsory insurance it is only 7.6% to
15% of your salary, so something between USD 273 and USD 540 for a family. See
[https://www.sympat.me/germany-healthcare-
insurance/](https://www.sympat.me/germany-healthcare-insurance/).

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moltar
It’s bizarre to see people in nice, high end cars, to queue up for free food.

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rwmj
Why? It's quite likely they don't own the cars outright. People were
encouraged to take our car loans and have repayments to make, and the US has
constructed its cities in such a way that cars are essential.

~~~
megablast
Because it is stupid. If you can't afford it, do not lease or rent it. That
way you have less money.

And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.

~~~
save_ferris
> If you can’t afford it, do not lease or rent it.

I agree with you, but the problem is that the bankers aren’t telling this to
people and have become over-reliant on subprime consumer debt like this. Uber
launched a lease-to-buy program for their drivers so they could nicer cars on
the road and then didn’t uphold their promise to attract more riders to Uber
Black. Consumers are getting preyed upon so hard in the US and we act like
it’s just business and poor people are dumb for a reason.

> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.

This is such an invalid statement for most Americans, and it’s deeply
condescending to boot. There’s simply no viable alternative to car ownership
for most Americans, period. If you have (or had) a job that required any sort
of commute and you don’t live in a handful of cities with first class public
transit (which are pretty much all in the northeast), you could spend up to
2-3 hours commuting each way every day using public transit. That’s just a
non-starter for most. Even tech cities like Austin and SF have poor transit
options compared to Europe.

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KarlKemp
Can’t get over the fact that even food banks are apparently drive-through
operations in the US, in what appears to be a suburban wasteland...

And considering that the increase in demand here is exclusively people who had
a job until the bottom fell out on the economy, shouldn’t the whole rationale
for requiring people to waste time and go through this exercise of very
visible shaming be re-evaluated?

As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t
capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money. That
idea was never a good fit with changing unemployment numbers, and these days
it’s plainly visible that all these people didn’t suddenly become drug-addicts
incapable of holding down a job. So why continue humiliating them?

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rcMgD2BwE72F
>As far as I understand it, it was commonly believed that poor people aren’t
capable of handling money and therefore should only get food, not money.

Do you know that the most educated people in the country are working hard to
make poor people buy stuff they don't need? Who is actually running the
advertising business and using the best technology ever invented to increase
their profit at all cost? Who's to blame? Maybe be should just stop pushing
people under stress to do stupid things and provide them with the best
resources to fulfill their need. Money is an excellent medium for that when
the game isn't just about blind profits.

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KarlKemp
I was mocking that idea, not supporting it. The problem always was that it’s
really hard to give evidence for what’s basically different ideas about human
nature. And that the truth is almost certainly some mixture of circumstances
and individual shortcomings. But when unemployment suddenly jumps to maybe 20
or 30%, that uncertainty vanishes, and gone with it is any legitimization for
purely punitive policies.

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nicwolff
Meanwhile:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-
dest...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-
food.html)

> In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh
> milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to
> bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that
> supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce,
> tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe
> vegetables back into the soil.

which brings to mind John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:

> The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards
> hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but
> the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float
> by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with
> quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze;
> and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the
> hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of
> wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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ctack
It's striking to see people queuing in cars.

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paganel
Why is this not being reported by the NY Times or BBC's International section?
And if they are reporting it, why isn't it on their front page?

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JoeAltmaier
'Staggering' is an exaggeration? In cities of a million, a hundred people is
maybe expected? Those pictures might qualify as a 'heatmap', meaning they
reflect total population more than anything.

And imagine those lines if they were just people. Wouldn't look like much.

Further, what were the lines like two months ago? Has it changed much? 1.5X?
2X? Is that the expected fraction of people with fragile economic situations?

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aaron695
> Photos Show the Staggering Food Bank Lines Across America

Or cars make lines look big.

"Minneapolis, Minnesota: Cars line up at a drive-thru food pantry. "

Is only 200 cars by my counting.

I'm sure there is an untold problem, but I'm not big on trickery.

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jacobush
Sorry, _only_ 200 people in line? That's a staggering number and looks more
like something from 1981, Los Angeles in the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness".

Not something that should happen in our modern world.

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JoeAltmaier
...out of half a million. During a time of disruption of services.

Note: _all those people_ could afford gas. So its not just about poverty. Its
about timing, shortages etc. Maybe they were all hoping for toilet paper...

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RickJWagner
The calls to open the economy will get louder.

We watch the world, seeing what others are doing and what works. Interesting
times.

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jacobush
What are you doing with that information?

