Speaking of meals: US food banks have been reported as having 6 mile long lines and were required by Dept of Agriculture to maintain a 5-6 minute questionnaire (per meal recipient) up until a week ago.
Unemployment rate is underreported because states can't bring applicants onto their rolls fast enough for demand (if the state even accepts the applicant).
Rent payments, Mortgages, credit cards defaults are all growing. Once people exhaust their stopgap measures, the pressure for civil unrest grows quicker.
Have you seen the images of food bank lines in the last two months[0]? The problem with quantifying demand is that’s typically based on ability to pay, and we’re currently looking at what, 20% unemployment?
Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve.
We have food banks in the US. Many are under heavy stress right now from what I understand. At least one food bank near me has already expressed needs for donations through local media sources.
I visited four food banks to offer them food over the last two weeks. Three of them were completely out of food. Only one of them had an abundance of food.
On aggregate, food banks may be stressed, just like on aggregate the measure we use to determine economic fortune may be down only 3%. In reality, this means there are lots of individuals literally starving and making $0.
Those people are going to struggle to hold out for however long it takes.
A month or two may be true in aggregate. For many, simultaneously, their jobs will never return.
We’re already seeing record lines at food banks across the country[0], and some are already warning of food shortages. We’re already seeing the negative effects, our society just doesn’t want to pay attention to what’s happening to the poor.
We’re at serious risk for community starvation not seen since the Great Depression.
"I actually do think that some people may starve."
Yes, that's been happening for a long time in the US; as you said, 5% of your state (and many others) suffer from food insecurity. The rates are going up now, I'm sure.
'I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."'
I would like very much to hear what your grandmother has to say in more detail.
Google 'food bank shortage' and 'tent city' yourself; there are many mentions in many different parts of countries. Los Angeles, Texas, New York, etc etc.
there is very little safety net in America to ensure anyone is fed at all once they are unemployed.
Everything I have read and experienced suggests this is not true.
You may be unaware of it if you have never been desperately poor. A lot of the food aid available to the poor in the US is handled very quietly because it's done by local organizations trying to take care of the local people who actively want to avoid letting predatory vagabonds know where they can get a free handout.
I have read in the past that America would look a lot better on paper if we counted emergency food stores as part of our assets in the same way European countries typically do.
Decades ago, I read about a study that indicated that only one half one percent of Americans qualified as "poor" by the standards of people in India when based on metrics like food access.
I have read that most housed Americans get three meals a day and most homeless Americans only get two meals a day. There are places in the world where two meals a day would be pretty good food security.
I'm sure we are facing some very real challenges. I'm not convinced that America is as precariously positioned as some people seem to think.
I see comments in this discussion indicating that people who have known serious privation are fairly unperturbed. I think the people freaking out are mostly comfortably well off who think giving up a few comforts is a nightmare scenario.
I'm all for actively promoting information for how to feed yourself cheaply while we actively forbid a lot of people from going to work. Cooking from scratch is a terrific way to both save money and give yourself something constructive to do so you aren't going stir crazy and heading for going postal.
But there are many Preppers in this country who already had a year or more of stored food and the things I'm hearing suggest hoarding is being done in a bizarre pattern that suggests a lot of upper class emotional BS is going on.
According to the research in Diet for a Small Planet, at the time the book was written, every country had the means to feed their people. Famine was due to political and social forces, not due to absolute lack of food supplies.
More recently, I have read of cases where food aid sat on the docks rotting because the whole reason people were starving was due to civil war. The food aid was de facto intended to feed people who were more or less being intentionally starved out and the people in power absolutely weren't going to give them free food from other countries.
Venezuela was in a real world of hurt before covid19. They were hunting wild donkeys and breaking into zoos to steal the animals from zoos. They are going to see terrible problems.
The US doesn't have to. We need to figure out what works so we can avoid unnecessary hardship.
A lot of people are working on it. We aren't just sitting here idly waiting for the four horsemen of the apocalypse to show up.
Exactly. Americans are spent out. The US savings rate is near a low. Americans are spending 95% of their income, and for the bottom 90%, it's more than that.[1] About 1 in 7 Americans has trouble getting enough food.
What we're discovering is that, when it doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff, the economy winds down to a state where most people are just surviving. This is a new thing. Historically, the big problem was making enough stuff. For millenia, society ran out of labor before it could make enough stuff. We're past that. And we have no idea how to cope with this.
Folks in the developing countries don't have any safety net(no $1200 IRS check; no unemployment tax; etc). Most of them are day laborers or small scale business people selling food on the street side. If this will continue, many in the developed world, esp in cities, will struggle for food.
What's your scenario for people starving? Congress refuses to give out more money? Workers in "essential" businesses (which includes everything food related) stop working?
I do wonder how long the general public, many of whom are now sitting at home on their ass all day, are going to continue doing so and let themselves, their families and friends, and the rest of the nation starve, instead of taking a risk and volunteering to help make and deliver food.
The divisive, isolationist, "only me and my immediate friends and family matter" attitude that is so prevalent in America starkly shows its corrosive effects in crisis.
> How cheap does it have to be before it is successful?
A good question, but the fact is that many cannot afford sufficient food. A quick search turned up this article from 2014 at the top (and many others too):
Unemployment rate is underreported because states can't bring applicants onto their rolls fast enough for demand (if the state even accepts the applicant).
Rent payments, Mortgages, credit cards defaults are all growing. Once people exhaust their stopgap measures, the pressure for civil unrest grows quicker.
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