Slipping Through Our Fingers, Part 1

During this holiday time, it's fitting to begin a series of entries examining the deliberate erosion of safety nets that once characterized an America we were proud to live in, one in which justice, fairness and decency were goals we unashamedly pursued. Today, I'll look at hunger in America, this land of plenty.
Mark Winne, who founded a food bank in Connecticut, has written about the rapid expansion of food banks since the 1980s due to cuts in spending for social welfare programs. And those cuts (including the refusal to index for inflation) have continued unabated, regardless of which party holds power in Washington.
The statistics are daunting: According to the Department of Agriculture, 11% of the US population was "food insecure" in 2006. That's a significant number of people who are "insecure" in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet (with a GDP of more than $13 trillion). And this is but one type of insecurity. If 11% are hungry, what number of Americans are insecure in other ways? How many are uninsured, have stagnant incomes and, as a consequence, are deeply in debt to credit card companies?
The cuts in social spending, and the food stamp program in particular, have been relentless. And, as the program doesn't take inflation into account, the result is real dollar cuts year over year.
One of the reasons why we have 35 million working class Americans struggling to buy food is due to wage stagnation. In 2006, "real wages for low-income workers were still below 2001 levels," according to the NY Times. Politicians offer unreal suggestions that Americans who earn low wages ought to consider retraining and/or returning to school to enhance their skills. Good advice, certainly, but not real world advice. Realistically, what parent can take classes and not work when she needs to pay the rent and feed her children? The obstacles are clearly too great.
What the country desperately needs is a return to decency translated into legislation. Candidates, in this, the bizarre carnivale known as the election cycle, must be required to show how their philosophical positions are reflected in their policies. Of the several candidates running, only John Edwards has made the issues facing the working poor central to his campaign. He proposes a combination of lower taxes (or, better yet, tax credits), an increase in the minimum wage and universal health access, among other things. These, at the least, are critical to addressing this problem in a serious, compassionate, and just manner.
Other than Edwards, however, silence reigns on this and other truly social and (fundamentally) family issues. The working poor cannot afford candidates who talk of "family values" then embrace policies that are anything but.