Seriously, What Is Wrong With These People?

by tristero

From the great Mark Bittman, who has moved very deeply into food politics.

[The poor] are — once again — under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted “Welfare Reform 2011” bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I’m sticking to those related to food.)

These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending…

In 2010, corporate profits grew at their fastest rate since 1950, and we set records in the number of Americans on food stamps. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all American households combined, the effective tax rate on the nation’s richest people has fallen by about half in the last 20 years, and General Electric paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes on profits of more than $14 billion. Meanwhile, roughly 45 million Americans spend a third of their posttax income on food — and still run out monthly — and one in four kids goes to bed hungry at least some of the time…

“We shouldn’t be reducing our meager efforts for poor people in order to reduce the deficit,” [David Beckman] told me by phone. “They didn’t get us into this, and starving them isn’t going to get us out of it.”

I should mention that Mark Bittman has ratcheted up his writing on the politics of food in spite of my clear advice to the contrary. I’m beginning to suspect that he doesn’t read me.* However if this kind of full-throated advocacy is the result, I couldn’t be happier to be dead wrong.

*Special note to those in the commentariat who actually think that I believe that Mark Bittman, in fact, reads my posts: I was kidding.

(I do hope he reads Digby’s posts, however. He’s missing a lot if he doesn’t.)