fat and starving

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005112.html

Jane Galt notes that reuters amazing fact
""In U.S., So Many Obese, So Many Hungry" says that "In a nation where obesity is the second-leading cause of death, 33 million Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from -- a year-round paradox that only becomes more pronounced during the holidays.""

Makes no sense since it seemingly implies that there are many starving fat people since

"those living below the poverty line have much higher incidence of obesity than those living above it."

As you can see from the comments the debate quickly decended into a debate over whether it was posible to eat healthy food on a budget.

As most commenters noted it SHOULD be much cheeper to eat healthy and the cost of doing so on a very tight budget could be in the region of as little as 1 US dollar and change a day for some commenters and for me about 4 NZ dollars a day (actually geting some meat!). Most of us who have been poor students know this super lazy and cheap sort of diet.

But hte problem is that this debate is obscuring the real question. What we should be asking is "what can we do to improve the situation" as oppsoed to "are poor people lazy or not".

Poor peopel are poor for many reasons BUT on average I think we can say that they are poor partly because they cannot manage money well, if you start expecting them to manage money well all that is likely to happen is that you will be disapointed.

Saying "why dont you manage your money effectively!" could be just as effective as saying "why dont you get all A's in your exams!" to a student or "why dont you make more money" to those same poor people.

We can spend all day debating whether they are bad for not being able to do that but that does nothing.