In all seriousness, it’s not just the money. It’s also the time. Having a varied, healthful diet requires time, effort, skill, and education. If it’s not our own, we’ll end up paying someone else for it in one way or another. Many people are working multiple jobs to get by and don’t have the luxury of spending hours shopping, cooking, and cleaning every day. You might point out that if they worked less, they could afford the time to buy cheaper food. Unfortunately, that won’t make most of their other goods and services any less expensive. The Federal Poverty Limit is based on just covering rent. Minimum wage in most states at full time will put a person a little bit over that. With the utilities, transportation, and healthcare required to maintain a job, there may be very little left over for food.
The US is in the top 10 but not the top 5 for GDP per Capita PPP, but it’s not in the top 100 for wealth or income equality. The median wage has been diverging from the mean wage for quite some time. These problems are by no means exclusive to the US or even the Western World. Nonetheless, the poorest, fully-employed members of our workforce here still somehow live as if in a developing nation regarding access to medicine, education, technology, food, clean water, transportation, housing, physical security and other things that could help them advance.
Yeah! Let them eat beans!
In all seriousness, it’s not just the money. It’s also the time. Having a varied, healthful diet requires time, effort, skill, and education. If it’s not our own, we’ll end up paying someone else for it in one way or another. Many people are working multiple jobs to get by and don’t have the luxury of spending hours shopping, cooking, and cleaning every day. You might point out that if they worked less, they could afford the time to buy cheaper food. Unfortunately, that won’t make most of their other goods and services any less expensive. The Federal Poverty Limit is based on just covering rent. Minimum wage in most states at full time will put a person a little bit over that. With the utilities, transportation, and healthcare required to maintain a job, there may be very little left over for food.
Y’all need to sort out your country if this is deemed a luxury in America. Richest nation on the planet, my arse!
We’re trying! It is not going well.
The US is in the top 10 but not the top 5 for GDP per Capita PPP, but it’s not in the top 100 for wealth or income equality. The median wage has been diverging from the mean wage for quite some time. These problems are by no means exclusive to the US or even the Western World. Nonetheless, the poorest, fully-employed members of our workforce here still somehow live as if in a developing nation regarding access to medicine, education, technology, food, clean water, transportation, housing, physical security and other things that could help them advance.