Democrats ramping up new endless war
House Democrats are handing Joe Biden a welcome distraction from the Afghanistan debacle by pressing the president to ramp up efforts to fight hunger in the U.S.
As The Hill reported, the Democratic heads of 25 House committees, including Mass. Rep. Jim McGovern, chairman of the House Rules Committee, sent a letter to Biden on Wednesday urging him to gather a variety of stakeholders for a national sitdown to come up with a plan to end food insecurity across the U.S.
“The pandemic exacerbated the realities of the nation’s hunger crisis. Even before the pandemic, nearly 40 million Americans went hungry,” the Democrats wrote. “The status quo isn’t working. We need transformational change now.”
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted in March, included roughly $12 billion for low-income food programs, including an expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps, and nutrition initiatives targeting children forced by the pandemic to stay at home, where they no longer had access to school meal programs.
Yet despite the additional funding, 11% of adults with children said earlier this summer that they don’t have enough to eat, according to a survey by the Census Bureau. While that number has dipped to 8.4% with the arrival of the expanded child tax credit — a provision of the American Rescue Plan that launched July 15 — the figure remains much higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The Democrats are suggesting an overhaul in how policymakers approach hunger. They want their proposed conference to include business leaders, nonprofit groups, tribal leaders, activists and those who have experienced hunger personally. They want “to design a roadmap to end hunger in America by 2030.”
The goal is vague and distant enough that any immediate pressure is off, but as anyone who remembers President Lyndon
Johnson’s War on Poverty knows, the best intentions working on the greatest causes can result in very little progress.
In January 1964, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” Over 50 years, taxpayers spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s war, according to the Heritage Foundation. The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty report for 2013 showed that 14.5 % of Americans were considered poor. That’s almost the same poverty rate as in 1967, three years after the War on Poverty started.
The poverty rate fell to 10.5% in 2019, tied to a rise in income and more people in the workforce, according to the Census Bureau.
“By working past artificial government silos and focusing on holistic solutions, we can improve the nation’s health and nutrition while strengthening our food delivery system,” the Democrats wrote.
That’s a rather pie-in-the-sky statement — are they talking about supply chains, farm production, limiting food choices to “healthy” alternatives?
What of things that are out of our control, such as mega cargo ships idling in ports, unable to unload containers because of the backlog. Food and other supplies go undelivered, or delayed by weeks if not longer. This is caused in part by a spike in consumer spending. How would lawmakers adjust for that?
For now, this will give Biden something new to talk about, and new promises to give to the American people.
If anyone will believe him.