Monday, September 23, 2013

On Poverty

World Economics is in a strange place, a few doing very well and the 99% not sure they belong to the world around them.

A comment on Krugman's piece caught my attention:
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I've got a big box super-saver type grocery in my neighborhood, the type place where most product is put on shelves in the shipping boxes with the top cut off, where you bag your own to save a few pennies. Low cost, low quality, big bulk packs of generic products. I frequently go by and the parking lot looks empty, except on the first of the month. It's packed with crowds of shoppers piling in. I was coming home from a night out last month when I saw the parking lot filled to capacity at 11 pm on a Saturday night. People milling around by the hundreds. Why? At midnight on the 1st of the month, their accounts would be credited with their monthly SNAP payments. And people could afford to buy their children food.
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Life is hard in US. Elsewhere, in India, home to quarter of the world's hungry, the government has launched a program to give highly subsidized grains to nearly 70% of the country!  This has its  serious pros and cons. But on a lighter note, apparently there was an ad for this program that said, "No one should go to bed hungry", and the response from most folks, "what is a bed?"

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