THIS SHIT MAKES MY HEAD HURT

Below is an article about Americans not being able to feed themselves in 2011. According to the study 18.6% are struggling to put food on the table. The data on food stamp usage supports this contention. When the Wall Street created financial meltdown occurred in 2008 there were 30.8 million Americans on food stamps. When the government announced the recession was over in December 2009, there were 39 million Americans on food stamps. We are now supposedly over two years into an economic recovery (Obama & CNBC tell me so) and the number of Americans on food stamps is 46.3 million – and still rising. Anecdotal evidence is everywhere as the food bank near my house had to move to a building three times as large as their old facility. Senior citizens have barely gotten an increase in their Social Security payments for the last three years, while the price of food is up 20% to 30%. Anyone who shops at a grocery store knows this is true (except for Ben Bernanke).

But, the stock market is soaring. The MSM is proclaiming good times are back. Even though millions of Americans have given up looking for a job, the unemployment rate keeps falling. Bernanke and the BLS tells us there is no inflation. When I drive through West Philly I see brand new luxury automobiles surrounding low income housing and broken down hovels. The wheels on some of these luxury autos cost more than my Honda Insight. There is no one starving in West Philly. The inhabitants of this squalor are generally obese. Their hovels have Direct TV satellite dishes on their roofs. Every supposedly poor person I see has a cell phone to their ear. The average household income in this neighborhood is $16,000. The median home value is $25,000. The true unemployment rate exceeds 50%.

You can see why this shit makes my head hurt. Nothing makes sense anymore. My belief is that there are millions of good proud people who are having a very difficult time feeding themselves. They are the people in the formerly working middle class. They never took a handout from the government like the parasites living in West Philly. They worked blue collar jobs and lived within their means. Their jobs got shipped off to China by Harvard MBA efficiency experts. They are dying a slow painful death. The 99 weeks of unemployment has run out. Despite the government propaganda, there are no new jobs being created. The entitlement class knows how to play the system. They are not starving. Obama will keep them happy in order to get re-elected. It’s the once proud working middle class (the backbone of the country) that are suffering the most.

Even though I think I understand what is going on, this shit still makes my head hurt.

Growing Number Of Americans Can’t Afford Food, Study Finds

Here in the United States, growing numbers of people can’t afford that most basic of necessities: food.

More Americans said they struggled to buy food in 2011 than in any year since the financial crisis, according to a recent report from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research group. About 18.6 percent of people — almost one out of every five — told Gallup pollsters that they couldn’t always afford to feed everyone in their family in 2011.

One might assume that number got smaller wrapped up with the national unemployment rate falling for several consecutive months. In actuality, the reverse proved true: the number of people who said they couldn’t afford food just kept rising and rising.

The findings from FRAC highlight what many people already know: The economic recovery, in theory now more than two years old, has done little to keep millions of Americans out of poverty and deprivation. Incomes for many haven’t kept pace with the cost of living, and for a large swath of the country, things today are as bad as ever, or worse.

Forty-six million people lived below the poverty line as of 2010, a record number, according to the Census Bureau, and one that’s not even as high as some other estimates would have it. Take a further step back and the situation appears even more dire. About 45 percent of people in the U.S. have reported not being able to cover their basic living expenses, including food, shelter and transportation, according to the group Wider Opportunities for Women.

The official poverty rate is about 15 percent, but over two-fifths of Americans have so little saved that one financial emergency is all it would take to put them in poverty, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development.

These high rates of financial insecurity — a consequence of the weak job market, and the prevalence of jobs that don’t pay very well — are making themselves felt at the level of everyday spending.

Recently, for example, a Center for Housing Policy study found that a growing number of middle-income owners and renters are paying more than half their earnings just to keep a roof over their heads. And as of 2009, almost one in five Americans over 50 years old were skipping on doctor visits, switching to cheaper medications or forgoing some medicines entirely out of financial necessity, according to a recently published study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank.

As for widespread hunger of the kind recorded by FRAC, research shows that the entire country ends up paying one way or another. While the people who can’t afford food are obviously suffering the worst, the social costs incurred — from the money spent to keep food pantries open to the lifelong diminished earning power of impoverished children — come to about $167 billion a year, or $542 for every man, woman and child in the country.