[CLUE-Talk] Bowling for Columbine

[David Anselmi]

<disclaimer: I usually stay out of this sort of discussion as I have no 
particular expertise in it.  So feel free to ignore me.>

Jeffery Cann wrote:
[...]
> 
> Regardless of your personal feelings about the film maker, I would think that 
> folks responding to Sean's statements would look around for some other 
> statistics about hunger in the US before you decry someone's statements.

Gee, isn't that what I did?  Corrected Sean's guess at the US population 
and got a poverty figure from the Census Bureau?  I don't give a hoot 
about the film maker, never heard of him.  Regardless, the numbers I 
found seemed to back him up.

> 
> Check out the Food Bank of the Rockies web site:
> 
>  + http://www.foodbankrockies.org/hunger.cfm
> 
> "33 million Americans are struggling to meet their basic food needs. 12 
> million are children, a disproportionate amount (35.7%) as they are only 
> one-forth (25.6%) of the population. (Poverty in the United States: 2001, US 
> Census Bureau)"

This doesn't support your argument.  These are Census poverty figures, 
which are based on income.  The food bank spins that to mean "struggling 
to meet their basic food needs" but the Census doesn't really survey for 
that (and I think OPM is involved in setting the poverty level--that 
doesn't come from the survey either).  Seems to me that the discussion 
determined MM's numbers were in the right range but maybe didn't support 
exactly what he said they did.

Since you got me ranting...  Who cares whether the hungry population is 
10% or 70%?  If I knew a hungry person, I'd help him.  I have other 
criteria for charity than how widespread the problem is.

The real question is, "Why are these people hungry?"  (Hungry being a 
more concrete problem than below the poverty line.)  If we knew that, we 
could fix it, couldn't we?  Or admit it is unfixable and live with the 
fact that there are hungry people in the world.  Probably the reason 
varies widely from person to person, which leads me to the other 
unrelated point I'll rant about...

If the government would quit taking so much of my money, I'd have more 
of it to help hungry people with.  I don't really want to pay the 
government to feed hungry people because a) the government is close to 
the least efficient way to do that, b) government programs are one size 
fits all and I just said that people are hungry for different reasons, 
and c) we don't want to give people fish we want to teach them how to fish.

Solving poverty is a local (perhaps even individual) problem so it 
should be handled locally.  This is called "subsidiarity".  Let me know 
if you want me to dig up a paper on it.

I hope no one gets hard feelings over this.  I don't have any, just venting.

Dave