As many in America try to use guilt to enforce oppressive taxation to pay for pet programs to feed the poor in America, they do so without hard stats, using conjecture and limited anecdotal information to guide their agendas. But taking a look at the hard facts would seem to indicate that the problem of hunger in the United States is not as pervasive, at least, as we thought. There IS a world hunger problem, I will readily concede, but its origins are different from that which we've been led to believe and the solutions must be based on solving the problems that cause the starvation, not solving the immediate problem of starvation. But I'll get to that later.

In response to the alleged starvation of the poor in America, I must defer to a comment once asked by LW on another blogger's article. If people are truly starving in America, where are the bodies? If there's an epidemic of starvation our morgues would be full of the bodies of these victims, and they would certainly be put before us on the nightly news. Aside from the images of anorexics who are underweight because of their own actions, we have no evidence of a starvatyion epidemic in America. In fact, the opposite seems to be true, according to the following information:Link

The United States now has the highest obesity rate of any industrialized nation in the world. An estimated 300,000 people die each year from health problems related to obesity

I waded through 3 pages of google search returns, and 5 pages on ask.com without yielding a single, meaningful statistic on starvation in America. It seems to me if it were happening at an epidemic rate, someone, somewhere would have been able to provide some hard data.

The world picture, on the other hand, is not so rosy. According to the following website(Link ):

Every year 15 million children die of hunger

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you've entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.

The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world's hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world.

Three billion people, according to this same source (that's about half the world's population) live on US $2 a day or less. I can state with absolute certainty that, if there are any people in the United States living on such a meager salary, they are doing it of their own free will, as $2 a day can be obtained with no difficulty whatsoever within the United States.

While half the world's population suffers from abject poverty, does it do so because of the lack of funds, or does it do so because of corruption and financial malfeasance? A look at the money being spent on foreign aid by the US and other nations would seem to indicate the latter. Sending more money and increasing aid to eradicate Third World poverty will only help to prop up these corrupt regimes, and the aid will simply not filter down to the individual, where it is needed. Don't believe me? Point me to ONE poverty stricken country where the country's leader lives in humble dwellings.

As individuals, NOT as governments, we have a strong moral responsibility to help the poor and needy among us. But are we truly helping impoverished nations when we subsidize the very systems that enslave them in poverty? I'm personally inclined to think not. As to domestic solutions on poverty, we've not only been successfully, but wildly so, and every indication would seem to point to the fact that we need to DECREASE, rather than increase these aid programs as those aid programs are essentially killing the very people they're designed to help. Meanwhile, until someone begins to produce the bodies of those who are alleged to be starving in America, don't believe them. As one person indicated on another topic entirely, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And until the extraordinary proof can be provided, the extraordinary claims should not be believed.