EDIT: I don't particularly dislike Elon (the man has done alot of good), but he was the easiest example I could think of. Stock market is a better indicator of rich people's wealth.
Not that Elon Musk doesn't have plenty of flaws that people online will be happy to spill much ink about, but what does that have to do with widespread poverty on a national level?
Does the US not have a government and state-level and federal-level representatives whose job it is to take care of their citizens and keep them out of starvation? Elon Musk and his pals seem like a convenient distraction from holding accountable people whose job it is to protect their constituents.
Agree that blaming individuals makes no sense. It's the system that is pushing the poorest into more debt and insecurity while making the rich richer that is the problem.
A lot of talk about building a healthy middle class but we've lost track of that goal decades ago.
> Does the US not have a government and state-level and federal-level representatives whose job it is to take care of their citizens and keep them out of starvation?
Many of those wealthy individuals (or their companies, at least) have lobbied to ensure that we don't have a government which takes upon itself to keep citizens out of starvation. Not sure about Elon Musk specifically, but politicians don't just magically decide to ignore the needs of their constituents.
To spell it out for those in the back: reducing tax rates reduces the government's ability to fund public projects. i.e. roads, schools, and safety nets like food banks.
Also, the responsibility of feeding children has fallen upon schools in some areas. When SF closed schools in March 2020, one of the issues they had to address was "how do we feed the kids?"
Politicians magically decide to ignore the needs of their constituents whenever they think they can get away with it, unless they're saints - and not many saints are politicians.
The better question might be, why do they think they can get away with it? Why do they get away with it?
(By the way, note that this is not just a problem with one party...)
Whenever they can get away with it and it's in their best interest (thanks to lobbyists). If they don't get anything out of it, they may as well take the free goodwill from voters.
Yeah, maybe I'm too cynical, but I suspect that there's always some lobbyists willing to make it worth any politician's time to do what's not in the voters' interest.
Are you sure? I like Elon Musk quite a bit, and even I don't think he should go around telling politicians what to do. That's not what we as a society have businesspeople for.
I agree with you. However, there is the world we want and the world we live in. Until we have an actual democracy (which likely won't have billionaires, look into what happens in popular movements in the past) then Musk has an outside responsibility to society because he has outsized power.
Agree it's unfair to single out Elon. But Elon has clearly been anti-union for a long while and has building factories in states with low union presence. He's undoubtedly contributing to income inequality via corporate policies.
The cumulative pressure by major companies on congress is probably the single main reason why congress does not enact stronger protection. We got corporate tax cuts because of this over say better employment protection laws.
> Meanwhile, an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With food aid programs like SNAP and WIC being reduced, and other federal assistance on the brink of expiration, food banks and pantries are being inundated, reporting hours-long waits and lines that stretch into the thousands.
And meanwhile, in the other America:
> When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump start building their new home on the 1.8-acre lot at 4 Indian Creek Island Road that they purchased for $30 million, they’ll have plenty of equally famous neighbors to get to know.
> Indian Creek Island, sometimes called “Miami’s Billionaire Bunker,” is home to an eclectic group of some of the world’s wealthiest, from singers to hedge fund managers, inventors to developers — even the founder of a company dedicated to collecting blood donations.
> Just how pricey is Indian Creek Island? According to the village’s tax rolls, the median assessed value of homes on the island in 2019 was $13.6 million. Taxes from real estate jumped 6.4% in 2019 to $87,234, along with a city property tax of $63,000.
No people are not stealing food to survive. US have food banks and food stamps. People steal because they can.
I don’t say people are wealthy or eat enough. I’m saying your statement about survival is untrue, and as any false statement does not help to resolve the issue.
When was the last time you were unable to eat because of an income deficiency?
Funny you mention "food banks" and "food stamps" during a time of unprecedented services shortage due to a pandemic. Some people are still waiting on unemployment checks from 6 months ago. Stomachs can't wait that long.
An inability to use reasoning while also remaining heavily opinionated indicates you have never faced a severe economic hardship like homelessness and feel the need to shift the blame to others to avoid confronting systemic issues.
It kinda feels like someone is paying you for this hot take. People needing food banks and food stamps is bad. It's obviously not Yemen bad. This is so obvious it's not really worth mentioning. We have moved on from pointless comparisons of degree to feeling empathy for these people and fear for what this instability will bring about.
I never understood this because a Bezos, Musk or Gates aren’t gonna spend hundreds of millions a year buying up all the food and toilet paper. Their wealth buys them political power and influence but it shouldn’t really effect the supply chain as far as everyday basic goods are concerned.
So has our productive capacity fallen to where we can no longer feed everyone? Or are we producing enough food and then just trashing the excess when people cannot be afford it? It just doesn’t all add up for me. I am a novice at economics though.
Many people are starving because they are locked down and not able to work, but I think that the grocery self scan that so many stores are moving towards, enables food theft; or at the very least it makes it easier. It would be interesting to see exactly how much shrinkage occurs due to the self scan.
They also save a lot of money in cashier hourly labor. At least the ones that don't keep launching into "Please wait for assistance." mode every time you accidentally scan a fruit instead of entering its PLU code.
> At least the ones that don't keep launching into "Please wait for assistance." mode every time you accidentally scan a fruit instead of entering its PLU code.
or have something vaguely spherical roll off of the absurdly tiny flat space you're supposed to stack everything, with no walls
I swear I'm starting to buy big white vegetable cabbage instead of green cabbage now, just because it doesn't roll.
Agreed. Self check is such an obviously dumb approach, especially with high value stuff like meat. People do stuff like swap tags or enter invalid PLUs all of the time.
If you see a gigantic corporation continuing to use an obviously dumb approach as part of its core business, it's possible that you might not have considered all the angles.
Another thing that might be playing into the increased shoplifting is that a number of district attorneys are not prosecuting property crimes, especially things like shoplifting. Thus police have no incentive to do anything about that. Thus people know that they can get away with shoplifting so it is likely to go up.
More Americans are shoplifting everything. Crime is up across the board this year.
In my locale, it's an open secret that most retailers will not detain you if you shoplift. And it's widely known that you wouldn't be prosecuted if they did anyway.
I weirdly found the micellar water under lock and key a few weeks ago at CVS. They lock the deodorant and tide detergent because those are highly shoplifted items. Didn't know makeup remover is now also included in that subset!
The US is probably inches away from a serious catastrophy caused be the extreme inequality that's only gotten worse this year.
Inequality is one thing, but when you're forced out on to the street to starve to death and there's nothing you can do to improve your situation that's totally different.
The House passed the HEROES Act in mid May. The GOP Senate sat on it (and did nothing else either) for the past 7 months.
Oh, except for a hearing pushing hydroxychloroquine in November, months after multiple studies had shown it ineffective, and a hearing promoting an anti-vaxer just last week. And I guess a bunch of hearings a few months ago wherein various GOP senators heaped ignorant abuse on public health officials.
If your favorite small business goes under, if your local hospital collapses, if your town goes bankrupt, etc., the institutional GOP and its donors are to blame.
We can all keep our fingers crossed for Georgia Senate runoffs, and for some real leadership come January.
This is false. The Senate introduced the similarly stupidly named HEALS act. It takes two to tango.
It was politically driven: Democrats were afraid of giving Trump a win. Perhaps it was good politics, since it seems to have worked.
From Newsweek: "Despite a refusal for roughly the past six months to advance a smaller aid package that she deemed 'half a loaf,' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now willing to support a bipartisan stimulus bill worth less than half her previous demand thanks to, in part, Joe Biden's victory.
The Senate never brought the HEALS Act to a vote. Sending a bill to committee to die is not good enough in the middle of the worst public health crisis in a century.
> takes two to tango
Indeed, without any action from the Senate, the House is stuck. Again, we should all be hoping for good results in the GA runoffs, or Congress will remain unable to address any of our serious challenges ahead.
The 2 years from 2009–2010 were pretty much the only substantially functional Congress in a generation, and would have accomplished a great deal more if they hadn’t also had to deal with a worldwide economic crisis.
> The Senate introduced the similarly stupidly named HEALS act. It takes two to tango.
It didn't pass it, unlike the House and HEROES. The Senate could have acted on the passed House bill. The House had no bill from the Senate to take up, since the Senate bill died in (Republican-led) committee.
The House is the only one on the dance floor.
And Nancy Pelosi may have opposed the Republican position in negotiations, but Nancy Pelosi has no control on what the Senate passes.
If the GOP had been able to even get their own caucus to agree on a bill, they would have brought it to a vote. But they couldn’t.
Putting even the milquetoast HEALS act up for a vote would have put some of their members in a conflicted spot trying to both appear to care about the crisis while still appeasing hard-liner donors/supporters.
If the Senate had brought the HEROES Act as passed by the House to the floor, it might well have passed. But McConnell & friends didn’t want to see a relief bill passed, so they were satisfied to leave it off the agenda altogether.
If you think HEALS was milquetoast at $1.1T, you must be pretty upset that Pelosi has now agreed to pass a bill at $0.9T... after months of demanding no less than $3.0T.
Gee, I wonder what happened in November for her to change her mind...
I'll stop responding now; it's pretty clear a number of folks on HN think that only one party can play political games and this has gotten trite.
> you must be pretty upset that Pelosi has now agreed [...]
Nancy Pelosi is surely also upset that we can’t do something more aggressive, but anything at all would be better than nothing (and we might still be stuck with nothing this year). We’re in an extraordinarily severe crisis, and people, small businesses, and state/local governments have been in urgent need of relief for months.
Even jaded political veterans expected some action from the Senate these past 7 months, under the circumstances. But what we have seen again and again in recent years is that even when we lower the bar down to the floor, they still manage to trip over it.
> If you think HEALS was milquetoast at $1.1T, you must be pretty upset that Pelosi has now agreed to pass a bill at $0.9T...
It was milquetoast, but not primarily because of the dollar amount (which is, though, inadequate as anything other than a partial stopgap and bridge), but because of substantive provisions.
> Passing a bill you know is dead on arrival is pointless.
Actually, its often a significant part of the political process of building popular and, thereby, legislative support for a solution (which will ultimately often be a compromise from the DOA proposal.)
And, in a bicameral legislature, taking up a measure on an issue that is unacceptable in the form the other house passed it in, and amending it to the form that you think is better and sending it back (or to conference to resolve the issues) is a way of moving forward that is generally more effective than sending an alternative bill to die in committee and then ignoring the issue.
The GOP clearly did want to repeal the ACA, and ultimately would have (questionably, via budget reconciliation, requiring only a simple majority in the Senate) except for the last-minute trick of John McCain. McConnell expected him to vote for repeal, and so allowed other subserviant “moderate” GOP Senators Collins and Murkowski to take the token ‘no’ votes. McCain put in his vote against after there was no way for McConnell to get around it, and the GOP was furious.
After the successful repeal vote in the House in May 2017, the GOP threw big celebratory parties. You can see pictures of representatives smiling and laughing about the prospect of significant numbers of their own constituents losing coverage. They really relished the idea of taking away millions of people’s healthcare, and were profoundly disappointed when it didn’t work out.
As for the dozens of repeal votes while Obama was still in office: those were a quite effective partisan posturing effort. GOP-aligned media spent years on false propaganda about the effects of the ACA, trying to trick a public who largely didn’t understand the law or the healthcare system more generally. (To the point that e.g. in Kentucky people like “Kynect” while “Obamacare” is extremely unpopular, even though they are two names for the same thing.) GOP politicians were electorally very successful campaigning against the ACA while trying to sabotage it in every way they could. Much easier than even pretending to come up with a plan of their own.
Since the GOP Congress during Obama’s second term had no constructive agenda, essentially all of their time was spent on stuff like ACA repeal and Benghazi hearings. You are right that it was a bad-faith effort.
I'm still shocked that people beleive this. Well I'm not - It has been a reinforced Democratic talking point for months now.
Why should the federal government bail out state governments when the federal government had nothing to do with the state's actions? The state governors could choose to end lifestyle restrictions at any moment but choose not to.
Why should the federal government pay for the choices of states and counties?
Well if we open up with no restrictions a lot of people will get very sick very quickly. This will overwhelm hospitals. I mean we are almost at a complete ICU collapse right now already. And a lot of people will die, not just of covid but of other treatable diseases. Not to mention we will run out of PPE and medical supplies. Care will be rationed even more than it is now. More doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists will get sick and die. There will be a lot of death. So basically death, death and more death. This will disproportionally impact the poor and poor essential workers.
And then everything will shutdown anyway because nobody will go out. We might get 1-2 months maybe 3 months.
> Well if we open up with no restrictions a lot of people will get very sick very quickly. This will overwhelm hospitals.
The problem is that the public has been hearing this for almost 9 months now and with the exception of a hospital or two it hasn't happened. You can only cry wolf so many times.
> I mean we are almost at a complete ICU collapse right now already.
Besides a few one off stories could you please provide HN readers with some links?
> And a lot of people will die, not just of covid but of other treatable diseases.
They already are and do you know why? Because hospitals stopped doing "unessential" procedures for months and continue to do so.
> Not to mention we will run out of PPE and medical supplies.
Could you please share an article or three with HN readers where a single hospital has run out of PPE in the USA?
> More doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists will get sick and die.
If Covid is so powerful then why haven't tens of thousands of nurses and doctors died? They are exposed to do multiple times per day.
If you have friends or family in the medical field then ask them. There are frequent email updates from hospital leadership on the state of the ICU. In our area doctors are being asked to give up their time off and work unlimited hours (as long as the avg is 80 per week each month). We've had 1 hospital provided N-95 since the beginning of the pandemic. It's filthy and probably ineffective at this point. The last update said there were something like 13 beds remaining.
In the absence of any support from the Federal government. many states and localities have re-opened in the face of growing numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths (more than 3,000 people in the US died yesterday from COVID).
Note that states and local governments are forbidden from running deficits, which is why many have reopened and stayed open even though cases/hospitalization/deaths have skyrocketed.
If they want to continue to pay police, fire fighters, EMTs and keep public hospitals open, they need revenue.
Implementing another stimulus as we did last spring, with support for state and local governments would allow us to stabilize the economy while limiting the risk to the populace.
The outside review board for the Pfizer vaccine approved it today. The FDA will likely give emergency approval for it in the next few days.
However, it will take at least six months to vaccinate enough people to limit the carnage.
With a stimulus from the Federal government, we can save lives while we vaccinate as many as will take it.
Not GP, but that's my side.
Edit: Fixed incorrect reference to the Pfizer "virus". That should (and now does) have read Pfizer "vaccine."
I'd love to hear from others who disagree with my take. I think it would be a good discussion. I hope someone who does disagree goes that route rather than other, less expressive ones.
At this stage… what’s the point? I’m bored of this lazy and dishonest simplism cloaking itself as enlightened rationalism.
You know, because it’s self-evident, that any decision to “end lifestyle restrictions” is a complex one that involves trading off the risk of further COVID deaths versus the economic impact that lockdown causes. This is compounded by the external pressure of funding which constrains the operating parameters of states. None of this is controversial, and is a constant public discussion in every country.
Of course it’s not literally “impossible” for such a decision to be made. If I encounter someone making a good argument that this is the most effective path forward, I’ll listen to it.
Framing it as a rational choice which can just be made, free of consequence, at any point is a bullshit argument, and that’s what you’ve done.
The problem is food insecurity. People might not be dying, but children are growing up malnourished. That has serious long term effects. Food stamps and charity don't solve the root problem.
And food insecurity could quickly turn into deadly famine if we ever have an interruption in the food supply, especially with our "just in time" supply chain mentality.
Starving to death on the street might be extreme, but, being exploited, being raped, being used a slave, I've been there, and it's real and I assume it hasn't gotten any better.
You have obviously never been in such a situation.
I didn't grow up poor, but did have some time in my life when I was destitute, homeless and without prospects.
I'll tell you a few things about that:
1. It's hard to hold a job when you have no place to shower or keep your belongings;
2. Homeless shelters are frightening, dangerous places and many (myself included) preferred to sleep rough than risk their lives in one of those places;
3. Food banks/Soup kitchens, etc. are few and far between. I shoplifted and ate out of garbage cans when I had to do so;
4. If you have no fixed address or documentation, it's hard to get stuff like food stamps or other assistance.
It's been 35 years since I was in that situation, but it's an experience I will never forget. No one should be put in that situation. Ever.
You have no idea what it is to be penniless and homeless. And for your sake, I hope you never have to learn the hard way.
Unfortunately, because of the callous, calculating disregard of the US Senate, many folks in the US have and many more will learn the lessons I did.
In the Bay Area there has been a big uptick in thefts and break-ins. My sources are local people and first-hand knowledge (such as seeing broken glass everywhere on the street). I'm in the Oakland area, but friends in other places have experienced and witnessed some crazy things this year.
It just blows me away that (part of) Congress has stonewalled any attempts to get people money, given the lockdowns. Reportedly there are millions of people going on public assistance soon. This could get really, really ugly after that.
Giving individuals money is a top Democratic political point but they don't have the negotiating power to make the GOP budge. Democrats would absolutely love to give a $1200 check to every individual, as that would help cities greatly.
Socialist is a toxic insult in the GOP party, and it's how they painted the Democrats in Florida, as well as AOC and Bernie.
My anti-socialist Aunt and Uncle live on social security a pension from his municipal job and complain about their medicare copays when they cost more than $4. They also purposely don't recycle because of "O'Bummer." I tried to explain to them that recycling existed before Obama but it fell on deaf ears. My aunt literally dumped a giant bag of empty bottles into the garbage can and gave a little gleeful laugh saying, "Haha, OBAMA!" as the cans clattered down.
Meanwhile they have grandkids so I don't really understand why they wouldn't support environmental policies. They're basically brainwashed by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's talk radio show.
She had to because it was extremely bad, based on an evaluation from the Chairs of the Committees of Jurisdiction. You can read their top-line comments (presented with links to more in-depth analysis) here[1].
Nothing in that link seems to indicate it was “extremely bad”. Just seems like your typical not enough pork/special interest support red team versus blue team nonsense.
OSHA regulations and “census worker relief” need to be tied into this specific funding bill? Really?
I live in an area elsewhere with essentially zero crime, 24x7 security, cameras, and a well-lit parking garage. Someone stole the catalectic converter off my 2008 Prius last week, a part whose street value is only worth ~$100 and that requires equipment and professional-level skill to steal, likely by someone whose day job generates $70-90/hr.
Gotta be pretty damn desperate to risk a felony for a little over an hour's wages, especially when that theft requires actual work.
battery advances have turned the tide. I can get a good 5 minutes of high-torque operation on a battery-powered grinder - plenty of time to cut the exhaust and hanging bolts.
I was struck earlier this year when my local pharmacy started locking up bar soap. This isn't some expensive item to resell, like razor blades. It's a basic necessity that people are struggling to acquire.
This isn't what you assume. Inexpensive commodity goods like soap are frequently stolen because they are much easier to fence than expensive goods, since everyone needs them including poor people. Poor people can't afford to buy expensive stolen goods, and non-poor people don't buy fenced goods generally. Non-perishable household commodities are among the most liquid stolen goods to sell, so that is what people steal.
I've seen (obviously stolen) soap being peddled by apparently homeless addicts on multiple occasions. In some locales, they've been locking up the soap for a long time.
As an American, I'm furious that we (American people) failed these people. I want to help - I've been blessed with a great job and I want find a way to help these people. The food bank in my region is distributing 2x the food they did last year. The director of the site mentioned how important it is to find ways to reach those who are food insecure in dignified ways.
Find me more groups that want to/are helping with this problem - let's go help our fellow Americans.
Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere, so are student loan payments. So hopefully people won’t be evicted and not have to worry about bills right now.
But I wonder if an instacart app for food bank delivery would be a good idea. Kind of like meals on wheels. Dunno.. it would beat queuing in cars for miles.
Maybe there’s a way to do crowd funded UBI... it could start around grocery stores maybe with grocery store gift cards..
Food deserts are a big thing though. It makes me think that there should be way to instacart deliver food to people.
> Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere.
Wait, seriously? I haven't been following events in the USA during this COVID year, but I assumed that things are like in most other developed countries with regard to things expected of people. In most European countries you still have to pay your rent and utilities every month, in spite of the noticeable economic slowdown.
An eviction moratium exists, but it doesn't cover your bills. "Almost everywhere," and "suspended", lack truthiness. As far as I know, unpaid rent and utilities will be owed. Some legislatures and housing organizations forgave periods of time, I think - that could certainly give you the impression that it is ubiquitous.
Anecdotal: the food pantry near my home is often busy now; much, much more so than last year.
AFAIK, late payments can also be subject to interest and late fees as well. So, while some might not be evicted during the pandemic, they might build up so much debt and interest without income during this time that when things are over, they'll be filing bankruptcy and be out in the streets at a different, future time. I guess it's better than being homeless during the pandemic?
Pretty sad state of affairs we have in the "developed" world.
I expect that this will be solved by restructuring, bailouts and tax credits. The US govt buys most mortgages anyway. I think we will see massive government intervention hopefully we learnt the lessons of 2008.
Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere
No, they are not. Not even close to almost everywhere.
Evictions are theoretically suspended in many places, but rent is definitely not and many suspect land / property owners are evicting people despite moratoriums on them due to local governments that are severely underfunded, understaffed, and/or overwhelmed that are not enforcing the moratoriums.
Ultimately, this situation can almost entirely be laid at the feet of the anemic and mismanaged response by the federal government. Most of this could likely have been prevented if stricter measures had been taken immediately. And even if they hadn't, most people could be far better off if it wasn't for the extreme levels of obstructionism and denial being exhibited by parts of their federal government.
Financial assistance should have been sent directly to individuals across the country instead of being absorbed by corporations that just wanted free money.
This doesn’t make sense to me. Typically evictions are enforced by the local government and not the landlords. You have to apply and eviction then it’s the police or sherif that actually kicks the person out.
Yes, as you hinted at, the first thing to note is that the local government isn't necessarily involved in an eviction. Owners of smaller properties have been known to change the locks and simply remove or discard a tenant's property and then deal with legal fallout (if the evicted tenant can even afford legal assistance) later. In other cases, residents aren't actually aware of their legal rights and allow themselves to be unlawfully evicted. Also, some property owners are abusing the system as we've seen in states like California where they claim to be intending to sell or occupy the property to force tenants out.
In smaller communities, it's not uncommon for the local government to enforce their own interpretations or rules placed at the state and local level.
In short, evictions are happening, even if they shouldn't be in many cases. And as moratoriums expire in the near future, we should expect many more Americans to become homeless or evicted due to the failure of primarily the federal government but some local and state governments as well.
Washington State, as an example, has publicly spoken out about unlawful evictions and has warned to pursue legal action against property owners that violate the state's moratorium on evictions. For example, just one example from April 2020:
You have not failed these people; capitalism has. The solution here is to organize working people to exert the political power that is rightfully theirs as those whose blood, sweat, and tears built our society. This isn’t a matter of cruelty; it’s a matter of exploitation.
You're misdiagnosing the problem. The problem isn't that the police are less able to do their job and thus more people are able to get away with stealing food. The problem is that people are not able to afford food.
Those who can't afford can get aid at the local food banks and shelters. This is no different than it has been previously. These are good people down on their luck and need help; and we need to find ways to help and preserve their dignitiy.
Those blatantly stealing are the ones who don't see it as doing anything wrongful as society owes it to them. These are the same folks who riot and clean out the Targets -- it was not food being taken if you noticed. To them laws apply to others.
We need a more authoritative police who are given authority to really police. This means use of force when needed without being thrown under the bus for doing so as a default response.
What we really need is Judge Dredds or Robocops that can re-establish that "do bad things and bad things happen to you" that is no longer present in todays world.
Robocop, as initially specced, was the villain. It had an awakening, turned on its creators, and began .... well, serving justice, but still acting as judge and executioner.
If you are starving, stealing food is at the very least perfectly acceptable, and many would say just. I'm not aware of any ethical frameworks, even the most hardcore libertarian ones, which would claim otherwise.
The point is you don't need to steal food to survive. You just need to go to one of food banks or shelters that will help. I volunteer at one of them. Lots of really good down on their luck people; and they are busier that in the past due to COVID job losses.
Those stealing are ones with something to prove. We recently had a situation here at the Giant where two adults were stealing ice cream and when the staff tried to stop them they were seriously beat up. When has ice cream become a necessity to survive and something worth beating another human over?
The issue we have lost our moral compass in this country and it will not solve itself.
Food banks and shelters might be in good shape wherever it is that you live, but in many parts of the country they’re stretched to and beyond their capacities. Food banks are simply not a scalable solution to poverty. No form of charity is. Government aid programs are a proven solution to getting resources (like food) into the hands of folks in need.
As to your argument that poor people are morally corrupt, it’s laughable, below contempt, and not worth responding to. Someone is morally bankrupt, but it ain’t the poor.
My point was that the poor are not the corrupt. They need to be helped. If the shelters are stretched we need to ensure those shelters get the funding they need to cover the demand. We need to treat these people down on their luck with dignity and help them get back on their feet.
The corrupt are those with other motivations beyond survival.
The rich and powerful have lost their moral compass, yes. The way to fix it is for the state to partly seize their wealth and partly deficit spend, and transfer all of it to the poor.
And whereas people used to get help from wider family or community organizations, socialists first helped destroy those structures and now teach to steal what you need or ask state to do that on your behalf.
This is both heartbreaking and terrifying. Mass food insecurity can be a precursor to increased violence. Where is the leadership??
I have an idea: everyone with over $20 million liquid splits the cost between them of expanding food banks and keeping them stocked. Call it a temporary COVID-19 tax and let them deduct it from their next IRS bill. [I know, I'm dreaming.]
People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks. Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making, especially those making around minimum wage. At the same time, there are fewer avenues to actually spend that money, and the result of all of this is increased personal savings.
No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it. Crime rate is significantly up, and for property crime it's even worse than stats imply, because people don't bother reporting, as there's no point -- you can see that by comparing car theft rate to other property crime. Car theft is much higher, because people report most of them, as they need police report for insurance claim.
> At the same time, personal savings rate is through the roof:
Yes, people that can afford to save are saving more. The people that can't afford to save are still not saving, but the people who had a surplus now have a bigger one.
> People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks.
No, people have (per person) received a maximum of either $500 (to their parent, for children under 17) or $1,200 (for adults) in stimulus checks.
> Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making
Yes, when the $600 boost was active, that was true mostly for people making below the average state minimum wage because they live in low-CoL, low-minimum-wage states, because the additional amount was designed to move the average unemployment check nationally approximately up to full replacement. That’s true of even fewer people with the $300 boost which replaced it months ago.
> No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it.
If people had equal or better ability to afford food but were just taking advantage of a law enforcement withdrawal to shoplift more food, you’d expect surveys of food insecurity, charity food lines, and other indicia of actual hunger to be unmoved and the food shoplifting to stand alone. And you would not have expected a spike when the $600 unemployment boost ended, since available money is not the issue. But those expectations would all be wrong, suggesting that money actually is the issue:
If someone makes no income, they're not counted in the savings rate is my point. It's like people who do not look for work not being counted as "unemployed"
The appropriate statistics aren't savings rate, but poverty rate, unemployment, workforce participation, evictions (mostly though not all ilegal or undocumented presently), and similar indicia of how many people and families are living beneath sustainable fundamental minima.
If there's clearly a problem yet your indicator, diagnostics, or data don't indicate a problem, the failure isn't reality, the failure is your indicator.
Rising poverty + rising savings rate -> rising net inequality QED
I once lived in a neigh orhood where you learned to avlid the grocery stores on certain days (especially evenings when fewer police worked), as you would be harassed by people trying to sell you their food stamps.
I am sympathetic to people who don't have enough; I know several for whom food stamps and the local food shelf / food banks were thr only ways they got by, either as children or adults.
However, the persistent theme running through the comments here that people are dying in the streets of starvation and noone is doing anything about it is just a myth. Blaming rich people for it just makes it worse, as if the world were so simple, black and white.
Let us remember our Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to steal loaves of bread."
To be alive and abundant in the wealthiest country in human history knowing this is occurring is a sin, and it is not the slightest bit of relief to know God will out.
The real shoplifting, of course, is capitalism. Just because some people draw a few boundaries and say 'this is mine' (enclosure) does not mean it is fair.
The police and other (state) actors, who have a monopoly on violence, are there to protect capitalist private property (stuff owned by big corps).
"You know, Bill Gates wants you to think that his foundation is the only way to get stuff done. But if we lived in a world that had more democratic, accountable structures, these problems wouldn’t have been created in the first place. So it matters because the tech industry is so powerful, it’s so wealthy and it scales so quickly. And it’s doing this mostly in a black box. Most of the decisions being made are not made public. And people who are not part of the industry, have no say in it. It’s changing the world and none of us have been consulted about whether or not we’re ok with the changes being made."[1]
Often, downvotes are about the way an opinion is presented, not the opinion itself. Saying that capitalism is the real shoplifting is vague and unproductive, and it doesn't contain a counterproposal, so as a statement it's hard to engage with.
If the GP had come up with a proposal for how to fix this, which would probably have meant elaborating on how to completely abolish all private property in the context of the modern US, I think the post would not have been so heavily downvoted.
Did we see that? A lot of what is said by capitalist press about socialist countries is not true. If you ask an Eastern European old enough to have lived before 89, they’ll tell you a very different story.
Someone said that "winners write the history books," but how true is that today given that most developed countries are connected through the internet and information spreads as fast as the speed of light (literally).
Anything to backup your claims about Eastern Europeans living in the 80s? Anything I can read? Not trying to refute your argument, but I'm just curious to see things from their perspective.
It's not just history books, but capitalist control over media in general. Beyond selectively reporting facts, ideology is constantly reinforced. It's how workers end up acting against their own material interest so often, when acting collectively in solidarity with their fellow workers would gain them far more of their labour's value.
Remember Iraq WMDs? At the time, there was almost complete consensus on them being real and necessitating war. Now, we know it was entirely made up. The same is true of many movements and countries that oppose (for various reasons) US and EU imperialism.
If you don't have a significant sample of Eastern Europeans at hand, here's an article summarising the situation (https://thecommunists.org/2019/07/26/news/workers-eastern- europe-former-ussr-prefer-socialism/). It references many sources that I recommend you read. Many of the sources are capitalist and contain clear propaganda to that end, but also contain useful raw data.
There's a difference between misleading spin and being "entirely made up." It is an indisputable fact that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It is also probably a fact that most people hearing this term of art assume it means a catastrophic nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. It does not.
There's a site guideline against taking HN threads into generic ideological flamewar. That's because such threads are inevitably repetitive, tedious, and eventually nasty.
More and more cities and even states are adopting laws that essentially decriminalize shoplifting below $500 or $1000 worth of merchandise. Open air shoplifted-products markets now exist in major American cities. This is purely a political decision, not some pressing economic need. This is the result of the agenda of these DAs elected on aggressively progressive platforms.
That sounds extremely unlikely to me - do you have any references? Looking through gNews for 'shoplifiting' I see things like [1] which average around $100 or less and those were arrests.
And since then, many other cities have followed suit.
Contrary to popular belief, almost no one is actually in jail for small time drug possession, so reducing “mass incarceration” means reducing or eliminating penalties for real crime.
Here's one example of this kind of opportunistic shoplifting[1], though for online retail purposes, not open air markets. Those most certainly do exist in San Francisco, though. Wander (In better times, not so much with Covid) the Mission District, Outer Richmond, the Haight - Just off the beaten path will be street vendors. There will always be a "Discount homegoods" with an eclectic collection of drugs, toiletries, etc.
I can tell you that in Seattle shoplifting, vandalism, burglaries, car thefts, and other crimes take place all the time and it is not because someone is down on their luck and actually in need of basics like food. The increased crime has been induced for the following reasons:
1. Drug addicted vagrants are ubiquitous because the city doesn't enforce laws and instead enables this lifestyle by looking the other way. These addicts very often steal things like food that are easy to fence and barter for drugs.
2. Our city and county prosecutors don't actually bring charges/accountability against criminals.
3. The police department has far fewer officers per capita than comparable cities, and simply cannot spend time on investigating and catching suspects.
The revolving door of people committing low-level crimes is so bad that Seattle businesses have released reports on this problem (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752913-SYSTEM-FAILU...) and written letters to politicians asking for help (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752914-Prolific-Off...) only to be ignored. Unfortunately the growing problem of low-level crimes with no consequence for criminals has also jaded residents to the point that they don't even bother reporting most property crimes - after all, if criminals don't face consequences and insurance requires a deductible, there is simply no benefit to spending time on reporting things.
I don't doubt that some number of people who are shoplifting food are trying to be productive members of society, displaying personal responsibility, and just need some support to get back on their feet. For them, I hope we can improve programs like SNAP (https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assista...) to provide more benefits (higher spending limits for healthier food) with less red tape (less stringent eligibility requirements).
But around me and in other West coast cities I've been to, those committing these crimes are very often not deserving of sympathy and are willfully not being good citizens. To bring the constituency on board, we need to address both sides of this equation. We need to start enforcing laws and holding criminals accountable, while helping those who are deserving and in need. Otherwise, the rest of us are not going to be onboard with simply allowing criminals to commit crime.
For anyone who put themselves through college, this is much more a shrug than a clarion call for revolution. You can eat cheaply and well with a little effort and creativity. Good training for starting out with a young family, if any of you ever get to that point.
If you haven’t learned to cook, now is a good time. Electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, etc.. Learn to manage your time to make time for meal prep and cooking. Lots of folks take it as a challenge and love to share tips. Shop carefully, share car trips to the cheaper stores, share a Costco membership. The sharing economy isn’t just about obscene IPOs.
As an extreme anchor point for calibration,
.5 kg/day of dried corn to meet RDA calories for adult
So $40/yr to meet caloric requirements for an adult for a year with a car trunk full of dried corn. Some of us have heritages that basically did that.
[Not recommended as a strict diet unless you are a fan of diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Limewater is your friend. Webpage not for the squeamish...
Now add/substitute soybeans, cabbage, carrots, bulk spices, vitamins. Beans 27 kg for 11.50 nowadays. You are in the
$100-200/yr
range without adverse health effects...maybe healthier than what you are eating now. There were times your ancestors would, and did, kill for the chance at such a diet.
One may infer which Americans are shoplifting by noting the geographic distribution of urban food deserts and the surrounding gradient of obstructive retail security.
Food insecurity implies potential for violence, and urban food deserts are practically unprecedented. One may call it a unique American achievement in urban planning.
This promises interesting times when just-in-time delivery inevitably arrives a day late and a dollar short.
Just kidding, the USD is the first forever currency of the USG, the first forever empire. What's the worst that could happen?
Cities such as Baltimore and Detroit have already seen the process play out. It makes for interesting reading, from a safe distance.
Like a slow-motion forest fire, as the conflagration spreads outwards, new growth sprouts defiantly from the charred center. I wouldn't call it a natural process, but it resembles one.
Do the inner cities of other countries lie in ruins for decades, or is that an American thing?
So throwaway account here for obvious reasons.
I shoplift quite a bit of food from my local Walmart, not necessarily out of need, but simply because it is very very easy.
This Walmart has at least 10-15 checkout lanes that are always empty and instead have a handful of people "Keep watch" of the self checkout lanes in an effort to keep the bare minimum amount of people employed.
Most of the time they are too busy authorizing Alcohol and helping people to actually notice if anyone isn't scanning sometihng. In fact one time one commented to me that "They don't pay me enough to care about shoplifting" after I "accidentally" forgot to scan something.
I don't really feel any pity for Walmart though, they have a bad system and have taken into account that the amount of money lost through shoplifting is less than it would cost to employ more people.
165 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadPeople stealing food to survive while the super wealthy and rich becoming richer and richer[1]. What a great time to be alive.
[1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/11/18/elon...)
EDIT: I don't particularly dislike Elon (the man has done alot of good), but he was the easiest example I could think of. Stock market is a better indicator of rich people's wealth.
Does the US not have a government and state-level and federal-level representatives whose job it is to take care of their citizens and keep them out of starvation? Elon Musk and his pals seem like a convenient distraction from holding accountable people whose job it is to protect their constituents.
A lot of talk about building a healthy middle class but we've lost track of that goal decades ago.
It’s patently obvious that no, the US does not.
Also, the responsibility of feeding children has fallen upon schools in some areas. When SF closed schools in March 2020, one of the issues they had to address was "how do we feed the kids?"
https://www.sfusd.edu/about/news/current-news/sfusd-provide-...
The better question might be, why do they think they can get away with it? Why do they get away with it?
(By the way, note that this is not just a problem with one party...)
The cumulative pressure by major companies on congress is probably the single main reason why congress does not enact stronger protection. We got corporate tax cuts because of this over say better employment protection laws.
Disclosure: am a Tesla stockholder.
And meanwhile, in the other America:
> When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump start building their new home on the 1.8-acre lot at 4 Indian Creek Island Road that they purchased for $30 million, they’ll have plenty of equally famous neighbors to get to know.
> Indian Creek Island, sometimes called “Miami’s Billionaire Bunker,” is home to an eclectic group of some of the world’s wealthiest, from singers to hedge fund managers, inventors to developers — even the founder of a company dedicated to collecting blood donations.
> Just how pricey is Indian Creek Island? According to the village’s tax rolls, the median assessed value of homes on the island in 2019 was $13.6 million. Taxes from real estate jumped 6.4% in 2019 to $87,234, along with a city property tax of $63,000.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article247709685.h...
I don’t say people are wealthy or eat enough. I’m saying your statement about survival is untrue, and as any false statement does not help to resolve the issue.
Fixed that for you.
Funny you mention "food banks" and "food stamps" during a time of unprecedented services shortage due to a pandemic. Some people are still waiting on unemployment checks from 6 months ago. Stomachs can't wait that long.
An inability to use reasoning while also remaining heavily opinionated indicates you have never faced a severe economic hardship like homelessness and feel the need to shift the blame to others to avoid confronting systemic issues.
So has our productive capacity fallen to where we can no longer feed everyone? Or are we producing enough food and then just trashing the excess when people cannot be afford it? It just doesn’t all add up for me. I am a novice at economics though.
or have something vaguely spherical roll off of the absurdly tiny flat space you're supposed to stack everything, with no walls
I swear I'm starting to buy big white vegetable cabbage instead of green cabbage now, just because it doesn't roll.
Was that a cherry (11/lb) or a potato (0.69/lb)?
They're probably banking on people being honest in most cases, which thankfully seems to be a correct assumption.
Supermarkets are pretty easy to spot bad management in in particular.
In my locale, it's an open secret that most retailers will not detain you if you shoplift. And it's widely known that you wouldn't be prosecuted if they did anyway.
So yeah. Shoplifting is up.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-tide-black-market-2013-1
Inequality is one thing, but when you're forced out on to the street to starve to death and there's nothing you can do to improve your situation that's totally different.
Senate. House has passed stimulus packages. IMO further delineation is deserved, but contentious, so I'll leave it at that.
https://www.newsweek.com/pelosi-says-she-backs-smaller-stimu...
Oh, except for a hearing pushing hydroxychloroquine in November, months after multiple studies had shown it ineffective, and a hearing promoting an anti-vaxer just last week. And I guess a bunch of hearings a few months ago wherein various GOP senators heaped ignorant abuse on public health officials.
If your favorite small business goes under, if your local hospital collapses, if your town goes bankrupt, etc., the institutional GOP and its donors are to blame.
We can all keep our fingers crossed for Georgia Senate runoffs, and for some real leadership come January.
It was politically driven: Democrats were afraid of giving Trump a win. Perhaps it was good politics, since it seems to have worked.
From Newsweek: "Despite a refusal for roughly the past six months to advance a smaller aid package that she deemed 'half a loaf,' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now willing to support a bipartisan stimulus bill worth less than half her previous demand thanks to, in part, Joe Biden's victory.
> takes two to tango
Indeed, without any action from the Senate, the House is stuck. Again, we should all be hoping for good results in the GA runoffs, or Congress will remain unable to address any of our serious challenges ahead.
The 2 years from 2009–2010 were pretty much the only substantially functional Congress in a generation, and would have accomplished a great deal more if they hadn’t also had to deal with a worldwide economic crisis.
It didn't pass it, unlike the House and HEROES. The Senate could have acted on the passed House bill. The House had no bill from the Senate to take up, since the Senate bill died in (Republican-led) committee.
The House is the only one on the dance floor.
And Nancy Pelosi may have opposed the Republican position in negotiations, but Nancy Pelosi has no control on what the Senate passes.
Suddenly, after the election, Pelosi is fine passing the same amount she opposed before the election as only half what was necessary.
This isn't some right-wing talking point -- Bernie Sanders has sad as much. This was a political game.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fact-check-did-berni...
Putting even the milquetoast HEALS act up for a vote would have put some of their members in a conflicted spot trying to both appear to care about the crisis while still appeasing hard-liner donors/supporters.
If the Senate had brought the HEROES Act as passed by the House to the floor, it might well have passed. But McConnell & friends didn’t want to see a relief bill passed, so they were satisfied to leave it off the agenda altogether.
Gee, I wonder what happened in November for her to change her mind...
I'll stop responding now; it's pretty clear a number of folks on HN think that only one party can play political games and this has gotten trite.
Nancy Pelosi is surely also upset that we can’t do something more aggressive, but anything at all would be better than nothing (and we might still be stuck with nothing this year). We’re in an extraordinarily severe crisis, and people, small businesses, and state/local governments have been in urgent need of relief for months.
Even jaded political veterans expected some action from the Senate these past 7 months, under the circumstances. But what we have seen again and again in recent years is that even when we lower the bar down to the floor, they still manage to trip over it.
Correction: slither under it. They don't get over it, even by tripping.
It was milquetoast, but not primarily because of the dollar amount (which is, though, inadequate as anything other than a partial stopgap and bridge), but because of substantive provisions.
Actually, its often a significant part of the political process of building popular and, thereby, legislative support for a solution (which will ultimately often be a compromise from the DOA proposal.)
And, in a bicameral legislature, taking up a measure on an issue that is unacceptable in the form the other house passed it in, and amending it to the form that you think is better and sending it back (or to conference to resolve the issues) is a way of moving forward that is generally more effective than sending an alternative bill to die in committee and then ignoring the issue.
To me it looks like a bad-faith effort and a waste of everyone's time.
After the successful repeal vote in the House in May 2017, the GOP threw big celebratory parties. You can see pictures of representatives smiling and laughing about the prospect of significant numbers of their own constituents losing coverage. They really relished the idea of taking away millions of people’s healthcare, and were profoundly disappointed when it didn’t work out.
As for the dozens of repeal votes while Obama was still in office: those were a quite effective partisan posturing effort. GOP-aligned media spent years on false propaganda about the effects of the ACA, trying to trick a public who largely didn’t understand the law or the healthcare system more generally. (To the point that e.g. in Kentucky people like “Kynect” while “Obamacare” is extremely unpopular, even though they are two names for the same thing.) GOP politicians were electorally very successful campaigning against the ACA while trying to sabotage it in every way they could. Much easier than even pretending to come up with a plan of their own.
Since the GOP Congress during Obama’s second term had no constructive agenda, essentially all of their time was spent on stuff like ACA repeal and Benghazi hearings. You are right that it was a bad-faith effort.
I would have said it the first time, at least.
The House didn't pass HEROES dozens of times.
Perhaps because the GOP literally called[0] for that? Just a crazy thought.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/news/529195-arizona-gop-asks-if...
Why should the federal government bail out state governments when the federal government had nothing to do with the state's actions? The state governors could choose to end lifestyle restrictions at any moment but choose not to.
Why should the federal government pay for the choices of states and counties?
This is a gross misrepresentation that proves you have no interest in serious comment on this matter.
How do you see it? Do you think it's impossible to remove the restrictions now?
Let me hear your side.
And then everything will shutdown anyway because nobody will go out. We might get 1-2 months maybe 3 months.
The problem is that the public has been hearing this for almost 9 months now and with the exception of a hospital or two it hasn't happened. You can only cry wolf so many times.
> I mean we are almost at a complete ICU collapse right now already.
Besides a few one off stories could you please provide HN readers with some links?
> And a lot of people will die, not just of covid but of other treatable diseases.
They already are and do you know why? Because hospitals stopped doing "unessential" procedures for months and continue to do so.
> Not to mention we will run out of PPE and medical supplies.
Could you please share an article or three with HN readers where a single hospital has run out of PPE in the USA?
> More doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists will get sick and die.
If Covid is so powerful then why haven't tens of thousands of nurses and doctors died? They are exposed to do multiple times per day.
Look forward to your reply!
In the absence of any support from the Federal government. many states and localities have re-opened in the face of growing numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths (more than 3,000 people in the US died yesterday from COVID).
Note that states and local governments are forbidden from running deficits, which is why many have reopened and stayed open even though cases/hospitalization/deaths have skyrocketed.
If they want to continue to pay police, fire fighters, EMTs and keep public hospitals open, they need revenue.
Implementing another stimulus as we did last spring, with support for state and local governments would allow us to stabilize the economy while limiting the risk to the populace.
The outside review board for the Pfizer vaccine approved it today. The FDA will likely give emergency approval for it in the next few days.
However, it will take at least six months to vaccinate enough people to limit the carnage.
With a stimulus from the Federal government, we can save lives while we vaccinate as many as will take it.
Not GP, but that's my side.
Edit: Fixed incorrect reference to the Pfizer "virus". That should (and now does) have read Pfizer "vaccine."
I'd love to hear from others who disagree with my take. I think it would be a good discussion. I hope someone who does disagree goes that route rather than other, less expressive ones.
You know, because it’s self-evident, that any decision to “end lifestyle restrictions” is a complex one that involves trading off the risk of further COVID deaths versus the economic impact that lockdown causes. This is compounded by the external pressure of funding which constrains the operating parameters of states. None of this is controversial, and is a constant public discussion in every country.
Of course it’s not literally “impossible” for such a decision to be made. If I encounter someone making a good argument that this is the most effective path forward, I’ll listen to it.
Framing it as a rational choice which can just be made, free of consequence, at any point is a bullshit argument, and that’s what you’ve done.
The situation may be bad, but not as dramatic as you paint it.
And food insecurity could quickly turn into deadly famine if we ever have an interruption in the food supply, especially with our "just in time" supply chain mentality.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/coronavirus-food-banks-are-c...
I didn't grow up poor, but did have some time in my life when I was destitute, homeless and without prospects.
I'll tell you a few things about that:
1. It's hard to hold a job when you have no place to shower or keep your belongings;
2. Homeless shelters are frightening, dangerous places and many (myself included) preferred to sleep rough than risk their lives in one of those places;
3. Food banks/Soup kitchens, etc. are few and far between. I shoplifted and ate out of garbage cans when I had to do so;
4. If you have no fixed address or documentation, it's hard to get stuff like food stamps or other assistance.
It's been 35 years since I was in that situation, but it's an experience I will never forget. No one should be put in that situation. Ever.
You have no idea what it is to be penniless and homeless. And for your sake, I hope you never have to learn the hard way.
Unfortunately, because of the callous, calculating disregard of the US Senate, many folks in the US have and many more will learn the lessons I did.
More's the pity.
It just blows me away that (part of) Congress has stonewalled any attempts to get people money, given the lockdowns. Reportedly there are millions of people going on public assistance soon. This could get really, really ugly after that.
Socialist is a toxic insult in the GOP party, and it's how they painted the Democrats in Florida, as well as AOC and Bernie.
Meanwhile they have grandkids so I don't really understand why they wouldn't support environmental policies. They're basically brainwashed by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's talk radio show.
A reminder that Nancy Pelosi turned down a $1 trillion+ stimulus offer from the White House.
Trump makes $1.8 trillion economic relief offer, but deal with Pelosi remains elusive (Oct 09 2020)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/10/09/trump-ec...
Nancy Pelosi blasts the White House's $1.6 trillion stimulus plan, saying it's not even 'half a loaf' (Oct 01 2020)
https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-blasts-white-ho...
[1] https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/101320
OSHA regulations and “census worker relief” need to be tied into this specific funding bill? Really?
Gotta be pretty damn desperate to risk a felony for a little over an hour's wages, especially when that theft requires actual work.
Source; fellow 08 Prius owner.
Starve to death?
I've been there, decades ago, and that's not how it went down for me.
I've seen (obviously stolen) soap being peddled by apparently homeless addicts on multiple occasions. In some locales, they've been locking up the soap for a long time.
Find me more groups that want to/are helping with this problem - let's go help our fellow Americans.
Mortgages, rent and utilities are all suspended almost everywhere, so are student loan payments. So hopefully people won’t be evicted and not have to worry about bills right now.
But I wonder if an instacart app for food bank delivery would be a good idea. Kind of like meals on wheels. Dunno.. it would beat queuing in cars for miles.
Maybe there’s a way to do crowd funded UBI... it could start around grocery stores maybe with grocery store gift cards..
Food deserts are a big thing though. It makes me think that there should be way to instacart deliver food to people.
Wait, seriously? I haven't been following events in the USA during this COVID year, but I assumed that things are like in most other developed countries with regard to things expected of people. In most European countries you still have to pay your rent and utilities every month, in spite of the noticeable economic slowdown.
Anecdotal: the food pantry near my home is often busy now; much, much more so than last year.
Pretty sad state of affairs we have in the "developed" world.
No, they are not. Not even close to almost everywhere.
Evictions are theoretically suspended in many places, but rent is definitely not and many suspect land / property owners are evicting people despite moratoriums on them due to local governments that are severely underfunded, understaffed, and/or overwhelmed that are not enforcing the moratoriums.
Ultimately, this situation can almost entirely be laid at the feet of the anemic and mismanaged response by the federal government. Most of this could likely have been prevented if stricter measures had been taken immediately. And even if they hadn't, most people could be far better off if it wasn't for the extreme levels of obstructionism and denial being exhibited by parts of their federal government.
Financial assistance should have been sent directly to individuals across the country instead of being absorbed by corporations that just wanted free money.
In smaller communities, it's not uncommon for the local government to enforce their own interpretations or rules placed at the state and local level.
In short, evictions are happening, even if they shouldn't be in many cases. And as moratoriums expire in the near future, we should expect many more Americans to become homeless or evicted due to the failure of primarily the federal government but some local and state governments as well.
Washington State, as an example, has publicly spoken out about unlawful evictions and has warned to pursue legal action against property owners that violate the state's moratorium on evictions. For example, just one example from April 2020:
https://www.q13fox.com/news/washington-attorney-general-dire...
Washington State's moratorium is currently set to expire in December:
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/states-eviction-moratorium-...
I'm very interested in getting the BeWelcome community involved in helping out with food, as well as shelter.
How can we reach the people who need it most?
Stealing is now perfectly acceptable as it's just distribution of wealth.
Those blatantly stealing are the ones who don't see it as doing anything wrongful as society owes it to them. These are the same folks who riot and clean out the Targets -- it was not food being taken if you noticed. To them laws apply to others.
Yes. If [0] is a point of debate, we need to seriously reform the police system, and defunding/demilitarizing is a good starting point.
> When we have politicians endorsing ... riot, and use violence and terror
Source? Encouraging protests is not the same as encouraging riots, let alone violence/terror
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943829901/police-in-ohio-say-...
What we really need is Judge Dredds or Robocops that can re-establish that "do bad things and bad things happen to you" that is no longer present in todays world.
Robocop, as initially specced, was the villain. It had an awakening, turned on its creators, and began .... well, serving justice, but still acting as judge and executioner.
Also, I'd still like a source for the above.
Those stealing are ones with something to prove. We recently had a situation here at the Giant where two adults were stealing ice cream and when the staff tried to stop them they were seriously beat up. When has ice cream become a necessity to survive and something worth beating another human over?
The issue we have lost our moral compass in this country and it will not solve itself.
As to your argument that poor people are morally corrupt, it’s laughable, below contempt, and not worth responding to. Someone is morally bankrupt, but it ain’t the poor.
The corrupt are those with other motivations beyond survival.
I have an idea: everyone with over $20 million liquid splits the cost between them of expanding food banks and keeping them stocked. Call it a temporary COVID-19 tax and let them deduct it from their next IRS bill. [I know, I'm dreaming.]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
and household debt service costs are lowest in recent history:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks. Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making, especially those making around minimum wage. At the same time, there are fewer avenues to actually spend that money, and the result of all of this is increased personal savings.
No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it. Crime rate is significantly up, and for property crime it's even worse than stats imply, because people don't bother reporting, as there's no point -- you can see that by comparing car theft rate to other property crime. Car theft is much higher, because people report most of them, as they need police report for insurance claim.
All of this is, of course, entirely unsurprising.
If they were stealing clothes or laptops, your argument makes sense. People with money in the bank do not steal food.
Yes, people that can afford to save are saving more. The people that can't afford to save are still not saving, but the people who had a surplus now have a bigger one.
> People have received thousands of dollars in stimulus checks.
No, people have (per person) received a maximum of either $500 (to their parent, for children under 17) or $1,200 (for adults) in stimulus checks.
> Thanks to extra $600/$300 that the feds have added to federal unemployment, those that lost their jobs received in many cases significantly more that they were originally making
Yes, when the $600 boost was active, that was true mostly for people making below the average state minimum wage because they live in low-CoL, low-minimum-wage states, because the additional amount was designed to move the average unemployment check nationally approximately up to full replacement. That’s true of even fewer people with the $300 boost which replaced it months ago.
> No, shoplifting is not increasing because people lack cash. Rather, people do it because they can, as the justice system declines to prosecute and punish people for it.
If people had equal or better ability to afford food but were just taking advantage of a law enforcement withdrawal to shoplift more food, you’d expect surveys of food insecurity, charity food lines, and other indicia of actual hunger to be unmoved and the food shoplifting to stand alone. And you would not have expected a spike when the $600 unemployment boost ended, since available money is not the issue. But those expectations would all be wrong, suggesting that money actually is the issue:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/25/long-food-lines-signal-need-...
The appropriate statistics aren't savings rate, but poverty rate, unemployment, workforce participation, evictions (mostly though not all ilegal or undocumented presently), and similar indicia of how many people and families are living beneath sustainable fundamental minima.
If there's clearly a problem yet your indicator, diagnostics, or data don't indicate a problem, the failure isn't reality, the failure is your indicator.
Rising poverty + rising savings rate -> rising net inequality QED
I am sympathetic to people who don't have enough; I know several for whom food stamps and the local food shelf / food banks were thr only ways they got by, either as children or adults.
However, the persistent theme running through the comments here that people are dying in the streets of starvation and noone is doing anything about it is just a myth. Blaming rich people for it just makes it worse, as if the world were so simple, black and white.
To be alive and abundant in the wealthiest country in human history knowing this is occurring is a sin, and it is not the slightest bit of relief to know God will out.
The police and other (state) actors, who have a monopoly on violence, are there to protect capitalist private property (stuff owned by big corps).
"You know, Bill Gates wants you to think that his foundation is the only way to get stuff done. But if we lived in a world that had more democratic, accountable structures, these problems wouldn’t have been created in the first place. So it matters because the tech industry is so powerful, it’s so wealthy and it scales so quickly. And it’s doing this mostly in a black box. Most of the decisions being made are not made public. And people who are not part of the industry, have no say in it. It’s changing the world and none of us have been consulted about whether or not we’re ok with the changes being made."[1]
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/48506/1/wh...
berg, what other options do we have besides capitalism? We saw how millions of people died of starvation with communist/socialists societies.
If the GP had come up with a proposal for how to fix this, which would probably have meant elaborating on how to completely abolish all private property in the context of the modern US, I think the post would not have been so heavily downvoted.
Anything to backup your claims about Eastern Europeans living in the 80s? Anything I can read? Not trying to refute your argument, but I'm just curious to see things from their perspective.
Remember Iraq WMDs? At the time, there was almost complete consensus on them being real and necessitating war. Now, we know it was entirely made up. The same is true of many movements and countries that oppose (for various reasons) US and EU imperialism.
If you don't have a significant sample of Eastern Europeans at hand, here's an article summarising the situation (https://thecommunists.org/2019/07/26/news/workers-eastern- europe-former-ussr-prefer-socialism/). It references many sources that I recommend you read. Many of the sources are capitalist and contain clear propaganda to that end, but also contain useful raw data.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1: https://www.cleveland.com/community/2020/12/lorain-woman-wit...
And since then, many other cities have followed suit.
Contrary to popular belief, almost no one is actually in jail for small time drug possession, so reducing “mass incarceration” means reducing or eliminating penalties for real crime.
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...
1. Drug addicted vagrants are ubiquitous because the city doesn't enforce laws and instead enables this lifestyle by looking the other way. These addicts very often steal things like food that are easy to fence and barter for drugs.
2. Our city and county prosecutors don't actually bring charges/accountability against criminals.
3. The police department has far fewer officers per capita than comparable cities, and simply cannot spend time on investigating and catching suspects.
The revolving door of people committing low-level crimes is so bad that Seattle businesses have released reports on this problem (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752913-SYSTEM-FAILU...) and written letters to politicians asking for help (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5752914-Prolific-Off...) only to be ignored. Unfortunately the growing problem of low-level crimes with no consequence for criminals has also jaded residents to the point that they don't even bother reporting most property crimes - after all, if criminals don't face consequences and insurance requires a deductible, there is simply no benefit to spending time on reporting things.
I don't doubt that some number of people who are shoplifting food are trying to be productive members of society, displaying personal responsibility, and just need some support to get back on their feet. For them, I hope we can improve programs like SNAP (https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assista...) to provide more benefits (higher spending limits for healthier food) with less red tape (less stringent eligibility requirements).
But around me and in other West coast cities I've been to, those committing these crimes are very often not deserving of sympathy and are willfully not being good citizens. To bring the constituency on board, we need to address both sides of this equation. We need to start enforcing laws and holding criminals accountable, while helping those who are deserving and in need. Otherwise, the rest of us are not going to be onboard with simply allowing criminals to commit crime.
Stigler diet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16524061
Subreddit on eating healthy on a cheap budget
https://old.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/
For anyone who put themselves through college, this is much more a shrug than a clarion call for revolution. You can eat cheaply and well with a little effort and creativity. Good training for starting out with a young family, if any of you ever get to that point.
If you haven’t learned to cook, now is a good time. Electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, etc.. Learn to manage your time to make time for meal prep and cooking. Lots of folks take it as a challenge and love to share tips. Shop carefully, share car trips to the cheaper stores, share a Costco membership. The sharing economy isn’t just about obscene IPOs.
As an extreme anchor point for calibration,
.5 kg/day of dried corn to meet RDA calories for adult
http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/calories-in-corn.php
->
200 kg/yr to meet RDA calories for year
Corn is 4.30/bu spot price US
A bushel of corn is 25 kg.
So $40/yr to meet caloric requirements for an adult for a year with a car trunk full of dried corn. Some of us have heritages that basically did that.
[Not recommended as a strict diet unless you are a fan of diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Limewater is your friend. Webpage not for the squeamish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra]
Now add/substitute soybeans, cabbage, carrots, bulk spices, vitamins. Beans 27 kg for 11.50 nowadays. You are in the
$100-200/yr
range without adverse health effects...maybe healthier than what you are eating now. There were times your ancestors would, and did, kill for the chance at such a diet.
(And the CCP couldn’t even manage that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine )
Unsheltered? The problem is shelter...basic food for a year is less than three months of utilities, much less rent.
Food insecurity implies potential for violence, and urban food deserts are practically unprecedented. One may call it a unique American achievement in urban planning.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0276146715612550
This promises interesting times when just-in-time delivery inevitably arrives a day late and a dollar short.
Just kidding, the USD is the first forever currency of the USG, the first forever empire. What's the worst that could happen?
Cities such as Baltimore and Detroit have already seen the process play out. It makes for interesting reading, from a safe distance.
Like a slow-motion forest fire, as the conflagration spreads outwards, new growth sprouts defiantly from the charred center. I wouldn't call it a natural process, but it resembles one.
Do the inner cities of other countries lie in ruins for decades, or is that an American thing?
This Walmart has at least 10-15 checkout lanes that are always empty and instead have a handful of people "Keep watch" of the self checkout lanes in an effort to keep the bare minimum amount of people employed.
Most of the time they are too busy authorizing Alcohol and helping people to actually notice if anyone isn't scanning sometihng. In fact one time one commented to me that "They don't pay me enough to care about shoplifting" after I "accidentally" forgot to scan something.
I don't really feel any pity for Walmart though, they have a bad system and have taken into account that the amount of money lost through shoplifting is less than it would cost to employ more people.