2008 Hunger Report Goes Live

The 2008 Bread for the World Institute Hunger Report: Working Harder for Working Families was launched earlier today, November 19. It is available for download on the Bread website by clicking here. This is the 18th Institute Hunger Report, and the fourth I’ve had the privilege of editing. This year’s report is largely about poverty in the United States and ways we can address it through better federal policies. The report provides Bread for the World and its thousands of members and supporters with much to think about in the years ahead as we formulate an agenda to fight domestic hunger.

It was a deliberate decision to focus our attention on poverty this time, rather than hunger, and I will try to explain why. Bread for the World members have been remarkably effective over the last several years in protecting and boosting the national nutrition programs. The Food Stamp Program, WIC and the school meals programs are all much stronger than they were a decade ago. We are now in the position of asking—and getting—improvements to these programs rather than throwing down the gauntlet to fight cuts. I’m not suggesting we can start to take it easy. The budget reconciliation battle of 2005 and the potential cuts to food stamps we fought to defeat shows you can never afford not to be vigilant. But while the nutrition programs still need their watchdogs, it seems like an opportune time to shift some of our attention to the root causes of hunger. There is still too much hunger in America, as USDA told us only last week, but the issue is not a lack of food, rather it stems from economic injustice.

In this year’s hunger report, we examine the quality of jobs and why families that are working hard to put food on the table are still struggling. It is outrageous to think that a parent can work his or her tail off and still not be able to get their family above the poverty line. I believe most Americans would be shocked and outraged if they realized this. It doesn’t have to be this way. Political choices allow it to happen, for example, by choosing not to raise the minimum wage while costs of living are rising, by enabling corporations to prosper via tax cuts and failing to enforce labor laws, leading to the easy exploitation of workers, by deregulating financial industries that allow predators like payday lenders and subprime mortgage lenders to strip whatever little wealth poor families have, and watching this occur and doing nothing to stop it. Political choices enable injustice, but they can also right injustice.

The recommendations we call for in the report are reasonable; in fact, they mostly build on existing policies. We recommend scaling up a group of safety net programs, known as work supports, to reach a larger number of families. The rules used to decide which families qualify are based on an inaccurate, outdated definition of poverty, so then tens of millions of people are unable to get the help they need because they are not officially poor enough.

We recommend making programs available to families currently excluded from participating because they are not officially rich enough. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) does not apply to families that earn less than $11,500 per year. A simple reform like making the CTC a refundable credit would allow poor families to get what all middle class and wealthy families have. Why hasn’t it happened already? Fiscal responsibility—the last refuge scoundrel lawmakers cling to—is an insult at a time when tax cuts for the wealthy and the fiasco in Iraq has sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the treasury.

We recommend helping low-income families save money to build assets like owning a home, sending their kids to college, or starting a small business. It is common for governments of other countries to work with poor families in this way, but it is not widely accepted in the United States yet. Again, the government is generous enough with middle-class and wealthy families when it comes to helping them build assets, but policymakers act as if the poor don't have any interest in owning a home or sending their kids to college or getting a better job. Broad based asset-building policies have been used at other times in American history to help families join the middle class (the GI Bill, for example), so why not now?

The government will need to spend substantial amounts of money to implement the kinds of reforms we argue are necessary. It won’t happen any other way. But we argue that this is an investment that will pay off for the entire country. When families prosper, the whole country prospers. Investing in families is sound economics. When a low-income family knows it can get help with child care, it becomes possible for a parent to work more hours and allows that family to invest in its future rather than focusing on getting by from day to day. When more families can participate in nutrition programs, it means they can direct more of their own money to healthy foods, rather than what’s cheap and fills their bellies. When families have health insurance, they don’t have to be terrified that one serious illness or trip to the emergency room could send them into debt for years to come. 

Many people still think that families are in poverty because they don’t want to work. It was amazing to me to hear well educated people, ones who make an effort to keep up to date on current events, still not aware it is impossible for anyone to sit on the couch and collect a government check or get food stamps—but that’s what I heard time and again. It just isn’t that way, folks, and so if our report does anything at all I hope it will explode this myth. However, I believe it does much more than that. Working Harder for Working Families points the way forward for Bread for the World in developing a strategy to fight domestic hunger and poverty, and I am proud to have been involved.