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Maravilla,
How can you so flippantly dismiss large numbers of “facts” presented by others, while pounding on “40,000,000 children going hungry every day”? I not only question the validity of that “fact”, but I would also say that, given all the opportunities available in the U.S., if a child goes hungry, the parent is probably a lazy bum or a addict who was never responsible enough to have children in the first place. That may sound harsh, and certainly not true in all cases, but given the level of poverty in which much of the under-developed and developing world live, I have little patience for whining Gringos.
As for whether or not the sky is falling, or the U.S. is the “greatest”, as usual the real truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Rome didn’t fall in a day, it took decades of neglect, some might say centuries. Now that we’re the only big boy on the block, the only way to go is down. But I think it will be a slow decline. Even if it were to happen swiftly, people forget that we live in a global economy, and if things go to hell in a handbasket in the US, life in CR, as well as the rest of the world, will get more difficult as well.
Maravilla, you are wrong. There are not 40,000 hungry children in the US. The numbers are HUGH. But thanks for bringing this issue to the open. Here are some FACT’s for those that think you came with bogus numbers.
Over 9 million children are estimated to be served by the America’s Second Harvest Network, over 2 million of which are ages 5 and under, representing nearly 13% of all children under age 18 in the United States and over 72% of all children in poverty. [i]
According to the USDA, an estimated 12.4 million children lived in food insecure (low food security and very low food security) households in 2005. [ii]
Proper nutrition is vital to the growth and development of children, particularly for low-income children. 62% of all client households with children under the age of 18 participated in a school lunch program, but only 13% participated in a summer feeding program that provides free food when school is out. [iii]
51% of client households with children under the age of 3 participated in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). [iv]
Nearly 41% of emergency food providers in the America’s Second Harvest Network reported “many more children in the summer” being served by their programs. [v]
Emergency food assistance plays a vital role in the lives of low-income families. In 2002, over half of the nonelderly families that accessed a food pantry at least once during the year had children under the age of 18. [vi]
13 million or approximately 17.8% of children in the U.S. live in poverty. The rate of poverty for children under 18 remains higher than those aged 18-to-64 and for those aged 65 and older. [vii]
Research indicates that even mild undernutrition experienced by young children during critical periods of growth impacts the behavior of children, their school performance, and their overall cognitive development. [x]
In fiscal year 2005, 50% of children were food stamp recipients. [xi]
During the 2005 federal fiscal year, 17.5 million low-income children received free or reduced-price meals through the National School Lunch Program. Unfortunately, just under 2 million of these same income-eligible children participated in the Summer Food Service Program that same year. [xii]
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i. Aldeen, Halley Torres, D. O’Brien. America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network. Hunger In America 2006. February 2006.
From the Washington Post, recent news. This article addresses many issues with what is wrong in the US with Our Commander in Chief and his policies. Just some more “FACTS”. I bet anyone that more children go hungry in the US than in Costa Rica taking the both populations in proportion of size and numbers..
Children Going Hungry
By David K. Shipler
If you spend a day in a malnutrition clinic, you will see a dismal parade of babies and toddlers who look much younger than they are. Underweight and developmentally delayed, they cannot perform normally for their ages. Some are so weak that when you hold them in a standing position, their knees buckle. When they lie on their stomachs, they cannot push themselves up. Long after they should be able to roll over, they can only flop around listlessly.
Doctors describe these conditions as “failure to thrive.” If President Bush’s budget is enacted, there will be many more children in America who fail to thrive.
The most direct reason is his proposed cut in food stamps. But there is another cause of hunger, less obvious and no less damaging: his budget’s diminished housing subsidies, which will leave more families exposed to escalating rents.
It may seem odd to think of housing causing hunger, but the link becomes clear when you talk with parents who bring their children into a malnutrition clinic. They usually lack government protection against the private market’s steeply rising housing costs. They can’t get into public housing; they are languishing on a long waiting list for vouchers that would help pay for private apartments. Or they are immigrants ineligible for government programs. As a result, some find that rent alone soaks up 50 to 75 percent of their earnings.
They have no choice. They have to pay the rent. They have to pay the relentless electricity and telephone bills. In most of the country, they need automobiles to get to work, which means car loans and auto insurance. None of these can be squeezed very much. The main part of the budget that can be squeezed is for food. What happens then is documented by a soon-to-be-published study in which nearly 12,000 low-income households in six cities were surveyed. It found an increased incidence of underweight children in families without housing subsidies.
There has been a lot of talk since Sept. 11, 2001, about the need to “connect the dots” to share intelligence and combat terrorism. It’s about time that the country did the same to fight poverty. The factors that retard children’s futures are interrelated; connecting the dots is the clearest way to see the lines of cause and effect.
Housing costs contribute to malnutrition, and malnutrition affects school performance and cognitive capacity. It weakens immune systems and makes children susceptible to illness, which diminishes appetites and thereby increases vulnerability to the next infection. The downward spiral can lead to frequent absences from school and expensive hospitalization.
Even when hungry children are able to go to school, they don’t do well. “Learning is discretionary, after you’re well-fed, warm, secure,” says Deborah Frank, a pediatrician who heads the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center. She treats infants who look like wizened old men, and older children who are bony and listless.
What is not visible may be more serious. Inadequate nutrition is a stealthy threat, because its hidden effects on the brain occur long before the outward symptoms of retarded growth. Several decades of neuroscience have documented the impact of iron deficiency, for example, on the size of the brain and the creation and maturation of neurons and other key components. If the deficiencies occur during the last trimester of pregnancy or the first two or three years of life, the results may last a lifetime.
Long after malnutrition ends, such children have lower IQs. In adolescence, they score worse than their peers on arithmetic, writing, spatial memory and other cognitive tests. Parents and teachers see in them “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a volume of studies compiled in 2000 by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
Practically every factor that contributes to malnutrition is worsened by a lack of cash. A child’s food allergies are harder to address if a family can’t afford to offer an array of choices, buy high-nutrition baby formula or live in a neighborhood with stores that stock fresh fruits and vegetables. Eating problems are compounded when working mothers have to pass their children among multiple caregivers who don’t provide healthy diets. Malnutrition is also exacerbated by welfare caps and time limits, Frank and other pediatricians observe.
Youngsters who cannot succeed in school usually drop out and go on to fail in other ways. So the Bush budget exchanges a short-term gain for a long-term loss, overlooking the simple fact that the less we invest in children now, the more we will have to invest in prisons later. Connect the dots.
David K. Shipler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. His most recent book is “The Working Poor: Invisible in America.”
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FACTS??? Those 75 numbered nuggets sounded like they came out of a propaganda spin machine. And sorry to burst your bubble, but I know people who have all the trappings of middle class but have not enough money to buy adequate food for their children. They are not lazy parents or parents with drug habits. These are hard-working parents who struggle with the corporate greed that takes all their money to provide housing and transportation. Sorry you don’t believe it, but maybe you need to get in touch with the reality that is America now because it’s happening even in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods, including the one in which I live — parents going to food banks to supplement what they can afford to buy.
Not forty thousand — forty million children — who go to bed hungry! Hey, you guys, don’t shoot the messenger. It was on the news the other night. There should be NO child that goes hungry if that litany of other facts is correct, eh? Thanks for the back-up info Aguirrewar; I figured I’d have to dig it out of my archives today if you hadn’t posted it.
Maravilla, check who some of the recipients of food stamps are? You will be surprised to find out 20,000 active military receive food stamps. Active duty men and women in the US Armed Forces, junkies and druggies?
OUr local news did a story recently on the working poor, the military poor, and the middle class poor in our communities. I was shocked, but the numbers speak for themselves. The number of middle class people going to a food bank in our area has tripled in the last two years. Foreclosures have skyrocketed because of those wonderful 0% interest loans, ARMs, and high credit card (usurious) interest rates. Two people working at $50,000+ a year jobs each can barely get by if they have a mortgage, car payment, and two kids in school. That wonderful list of facts also neglected to mention how many millions (is it up to 45,000,000 now) who have no medical insurance, but if you can barely afford to eat how are you expected to pay a $500 – 1500 a month insurance premium. Gadzooks. What is wrong with this country?
So only your “facts” are right? I read and appreciate “facts” brought up by all sides on this forum, including yours. Some I believe, others I don’t. But to summarily dismiss everything someone says or makes reference to just because it contradicts your argument is a cop-out.
I don’t know what percentage of people on public assistance in the U.S. are “lazy bums”, but in my opinion it’s substantial, PARTICULARLY if you have spent time in truly poor countries. I’m sorry, but children in the developing and underdeveloped world have a thirst for knowledge and yearn to have the opportunity to become educated and to work hard. If there are high drop-out rates where they live, it’s because they’re needed to help out in the family enterprise to survive.
How many Gringo kids drop out of school to help out their parents???
Good God, people come from all over the world, escaping economic conditions we can’t even imagine, to make it in the U.S. They work their butts off, and many are successful. Any Mong communities where you guys live?
But us Gringos, we’re lazy bums. When we’re young we give our teachers and parents crap, and spend our days playing video games. We grow older and buy all sorts of material goods we don’t need on credit, have kids we can’t afford, and then make poor food choices for them. After all that we refuse to take responsibility for our actions and live off the the public teat.
I’m not an extremist. I know that there are many people on public assistance who are genuinely in need through no fault of their own. But we all know there is also a large group of generational “welfare” recipients. To refuse to acknowledge this undermines your credibility. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are WAY more productive and industrious than these people.
Should we care about helping the children from these poor families? Of course! It’s certainly not their fault. And the children are our future. Take care of them and they could be the next Einstein. Neglect them and become their victim when they get older. Surely the government can do more to promote education and access to economic opportunities, but it seems as though it only ends up creating unhealthy and non-productive dependencies, and a victim-based society.
The rest of the world is studying, striving for opportunities, working hard, and catching up. We’re all going to have to grow up and get our butts off the couch if we hope to compete.
Sorry I sound gruff, but seriously, spend some time in the rest of Central America outside of CR. Then tell me you feel sorry for the poor Gringos.
Gringo a lot of these lazy poor you talk about have been institutionaly kept in shackles by the so called policies that were meant to help them. I live in Brooklyn, NY and can tell you it is hard to blame the inner city poor in neighborhoods like Bushwick, Brownsville, Bedfordstuyvesant just to name a few. They have been locked down in virtual prisons, it’s like the sun light can not even penetrate. These are people who have been neglected and abused for generations, marginalized by a society/government who throws them just enough to keep them from dieing. But you know what I think there are many parasites who get rich off of keeping these folks poor. These people are born into the chaos that is there life and untill you have spent some time as friends of some of these folks or living in there part of town…even then you only get a glimpse of there life. On there little “island” they are surrounded by people who really don’t care or at best are indifferent and the otherside of the tracks can be just a few blocks away. They are outcasts in the land of plenty and all they know is poverty, us and them etc…yes a few make it out but not many. This is called institutionalized brainwashing/conditioning it goes way way beyond being a “lazy Gringo”. When you leave your country to come here you have done so to seek a better life. You may have lived in poverty in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador etc…but had a sound intact family, and perhaps your entire village for that matter your entire region was what we would consider”impoverished” you were not a minority so to speak but part of the majority…that was your life. The poor in industrialized nations are in an entirely different boat, IMHOP they are “victims” of our greedy hyper capitalistic systems that put profits above everything and we throw them just enough to keep them fed and sedated. The fact that our poors standard of living may be higher than the standard of living of the poor in Mexico does not make the U.S. a better place. It is unforgiveable that in a Country with so much wealth, where we can spend billions on a useless war(Useless to the people) we have no universal healthcare and we have millions of our fellow citizens living in housing projects, on the streets with out hope.Facts generated by any institution are one thing, I just have to get on a subway and go two stops and see entire “villages” in ruin in the wealthiest nation on the planet and there are no pretty sunsets for them to watch. I know all you flag waving americans will be upset by these comments “we are the best, everyone wants to come here etc.” But we could and should be much better, darwinism should not be the model for civilized societys….love should.
All it takes to wind up on welfare or homeless in this country is to lose your job, have an unexpected illness or accident, have a spouse or child die, have your insurance company refuse to pay your claims, or have your home foreclosed on. I certainly don’t condone the people who are collecting welfare and producing a litter of children that I ultimately pay to raise, but there are more and more working poor in this country — both parents working and still not having enough to get by — and with the dissolution of the middle class any one of us is only one paycheck away from a food bank. My main objection to the “rah-rah-siss-boom-bah America is so wonderful” is that it neglected to even mention our systemic problems of underfed and uninsured children and adults in the land of plenty. I’ve never gone to bed hungry, so the thought of 40 million children having to do it infuriates me. A hungry child is a hungry child whether it be in Costa Rica, Darfur, Somalia, Detroit or L.A. I do what I can to support our food banks in my state. I donate to fund-raising for Darfur, but more importantly, I have compassion for those people who for the most part wouldn’t choose to be poor, hungry, homeless, and persecuted
I have all sorts of compassion for people who try to excel and fail. There just seems to be so many Gringos that don’t try. Did you hear about Oprah’s donation for a school in Africa? She said that she can’t stand going into U.S. inner city schools anymore because the kids simply have no passion for learning. Ask them what they want and they’ll tell you an Ipod. Ask the same question in Africa and they’ll say a uniform for going to school. (I’m paraphrasing her).
This is what I’m talking about. The U.S. is still the land of opportunity for those who strive for it, no matter how poor you are. The same cannot be said for the underdeveloped world.
I say again – it’s hard to feel sorry for poor Gringos after you’ve seen the plight of the truly impoverished outside our borders. We have so much, and we throw it all away.
That said, I agree that there are more and more working poor in the U.S., and the disparity of wealth is obviously growing. Whether this is due to regressive economic policies, the rise of the welfare class, poor parenting, dollar-dominated politics, etc. is debatable. Just don’t try to compare what passes as poverty in the U.S. to true poverty with no way out in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti… That’s just ridiculous.
Maravilla, don’t let your good intentions blind you to objective reality. The U.S. is not the evil empire, nor was the USSR. Socialism is not a panacea, and hammering only one side of the argument while totally dismissing the other side undermines confidence in your position.
Lotus, it’s hard to argue with you, you’re too nice (tuanis!).
Me? I yearn for my days of youth, when I knew “everything”. Now I just know too much.
I grew up in Africa and spent many years in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia and the poverty in Africa simply doesn’t compare to what we see in Central America.
Seeing children who have been deliberately deformed (legs & arms horribly broken as babies) by their own parents so that they would look pitiful enough to beg in the streets for their family…
Watching children who have been trained to run in front of your car and get ‘run-over’ to then try and collect money from the driver (my Dad) is not fun…
And seeing bloated dead bodies in the gutters at the side of the streets when there was massive starvation going on in Northern Nigeria was not unusual at all.
The stock market and ‘life’ have so much in common… It goes from one extreme to another and then tries to find a middle before again testing extremes.
America is most definitely testing a number of extremes and there is no doubt in mind that there will be a societal ‘crash’ of some kind in the not so distant future.
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comIt’s easy to think that, given all the negative economic conditions in the U.S. But the free-wheeling entrepreneurial nature of Gringos and our (relatively) free, open, dynamic and permissive society always seems to adapt. Furthermore, it is well to remember that the fall of the Roman Empire plunged the entire “known world” into the dark ages. I can’t say if life was better nearer or farther from the epicenter after that happened.
I think that well over 50% of CR’s economy is dependant on what happens in the U.S.
“Known world” is an interesting way to put it. I can not recall his name but I was listening to an African scholar discus this time in European history. His point was that we are so Eurocentric at times that we forget that the world is larger than Europe and during our dark ages Africa was going through a time of abundence. GT I don’t want to argue, my point was to suggest that there are other forces at work and to be considered regarding the “poor” here in the U.S.. Education and a more compassionate distribution of wealth could certainly benefit the masses. The U.S. model is designed to benefit the most aggressive and the pursuit of these policies in the private and public sectors is what is driving the disparity in wealth. I will really go out on a limb here to suggest that a lot of the poverty in the world can be traced back to our(US/European) Colonisation and foriegn policy since say 1492( open to suggestions on that date though)? “The Peoples History Of The United States” provides some interesting information regarding this idea. Sweden seems to be doing things right, except for the drinking(blame it on the weather), the government seems to make sure everyone has a comfortable standard of living and some very interesting domestic policies. And after spending quite a bit of time in France/Europe over the last ten years they seemed to also be doing things much better untill the drive to compete with the U.S. and give big business more “freedom” to compete that things started getting less comfortable for the average person. This is not based on any statistics from a think tank etc…just conversations over coffee or dinner with friends etc..I also got to travel quite a bit as the singer for a band for over ten years and meet”average” people(literaly thousands) and chew the fat as they say. I was sitting in a cafe in little Italy here in NYC and heard one woman remark to another, refering to a relative ” As good as she is, is as bad as she is”, I liked this expression and got a good laugh out of it. I think this could easily appy to America…but i’m not laughing.
See, even when you’re mildly arguing you beg pardon. You were made for Tiquicia, maje.
As usual Lotus, I sympathize with your point of view. That’s why I put quotations around the phrase “known world”.
The conundrum is thus exposed. To survive, one must change with the times. Changing with the times destroys one’s way of life.
The only reasonable long-term solution is moderated change. CR seems to be doing pretty well in this context.
If CR does not sign onto CAFTA, it dooms itself to the margin. Look for companies such as S.C. Johnson, Oracle, Unisys, IBM (called GBM there) and others to move their Central American HQ’s to Guatemala, despite the poverty and political instability there. If it does become a signatory, Costa Rica transforms itself into the overwhelming choice in the region for setting up shop. That means jobs and economic progress. While some may question the definition of the term “progress”, I think most Ticos would agree that a better economy is a good thing. They just don’t like loosing their famed government monopolies and closed markets. Also, I think you can count on CR politicians to distribute the resulting wealth more effectively than in the U.S. The dominant political parties there seem to be left, and further left.
Of course, this is all academic given the democratic victory in Congress. The Democrats, despite their reputation for promoting social equality, seem to be more isolationist on this point than the Republicans. I guess we’re all hypocrites.
BTW, I’ve met my share of Scandinavians living in CR after running away from 50%+ income tax rates. I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that there are two sides to every coin (at least). Most of us seem to get fixated on just one of them.
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