"Food security." That term came out late in the Bush administration. Now it's everywhere. It's a euphemism for hunger, and we live in an age where honest language is severely curtailed in our political discourse. It's always about appearances, never about substance. Disgusting.
Hunger is on the rise in this country. The proportion of this rise which is due to people mis-prioritizing their expenditures, and the proportion due to genuine poverty, is open to debate, but, either way, at least one of two very disturbing possibilities must be true: 1) More of the population is losing its self sufficiency. 2) More of the population is losing its fiscal prudence. Either possibility illustrates the difficulty that our nation will have in the coming decades in retaining its sharpness of character. Additionally, this rise in hunger occurs against the backdrop of enormous wealth redistribution from the wider economy to the very rich, primarily in the form of legal plunder.
The primary weakness in our economic system now is that in America it is becoming more and more difficult to run a successful small business, while the large businesses which replace them are becoming less likely to spread their wealth out to the communities in which they operate, instead sending that wealth to the modern-day plutocracy, whose grip around the nation's fiscal policy has strengthened considerably since the 1970s. The economic resource distribution charts are staggering. We are in a position where, literally, a few thousand people, and the tens of thousands who aspire to join them, collectively dominate the vast majority of the wealth in this country. Per capita measurements of well-doing are becoming less representative of the economic realities for ordinary Americans, because these people at the top skew the curve so astonishingly. In short, the nation is not nearly as rich as the stock market, the gross domestic product, or the average annual income. Even the median annual income is becoming less insightful, as the downward pressures on the middle class are disproportionately affecting the lower bands.
I suspect the problem is easily correctable from a policy standpoint. The US economic system as a whole is extraordinarily powerful and resilient, still by far the greatest in the world. If wealth capture could be put to a stop--and this could happen with a complex but straightforward series of regulations, legal constraints, and oversight on "big business"--then upward economic mobility would reassert itself for the lower half of the population. Practically speaking, however, the problem may be unsolvable without the precipitation of a major crisis, for two reasons: The government seems literally incapable of asserting its power over the robber barons, and the American public doesn't want to be told that they need to spend less money on disposable luxury items and more money on public infrastructure and social services.
It's times like these that I can't stand the glacial pace of change. I wish I had a time machine.
