Help Needed

Many years ago—in 1968, to be specific--I had three very young children and was divorced. It was the late 60’s; could have happened to anyone in those times. And, like anyone in that situation, there wasn’t much money. I had had a job since I was 15, but for the previous 4 years I’d been raising little kids instead, which certainly was work but not work that paid money. One day, I found myself standing in the kitchen and thinking that if I ate only twice a day, I could save X amount of money. And then I found myself thinking that that was crazy. I needed to get a job, despite the fact that I had three little kids. Eating less than I needed was not a choice I wanted to be making.

And, I didn’t have to make that choice because I was lucky in most other ways: the kids were healthy; their dad was available; I had a M.A. from UCLA; and the job market was reasonably good. I found a job pretty quickly (as a research assistant for a U.S. Congressman in his district office). It was a great job and the kids managed with the additional help of some hired folks. And we all continued to eat three meals a day.

But that is not everybody’s story in such a situation, so since then, I’ve always been particularly sensitive to the idea that people in America, the wealthiest place in the world, ought not, at the very least, have to worry about having enough to eat. And yet, here we are in the wealthiest place in the world (even if not so wealthy as it recently was), and there are people without enough money to ensure adequate food. Oh, they may not be facing malnutrition or starvation, but they are having to feel some sense of alarm about the price of milk and cheese and chicken (even though we in Washington pay a lot less for them than our neighbors in Canada do).

Now, with an unemployment rate slipping upward rapidly, there’s going to be a bigger problem and fewer people anxious to respond to the need. Does that stimulus program include additional food stamp money? What’s the state of local food banks that help to make up the slack for people like I was that day who just didn’t have quite enough money for quite enough food? Are their donations dropping? Probably, as most non-profits’ donations are.

Even in tiny, remote, peculiar Point Roberts, there are people who need some help getting adequate food. Fortunately, Point Roberts has a food bank that is run entirely by volunteer efforts. Nobody in that outfit getting salaries, let alone bonuses. The P.R. Food Bank helps 30 or 40 households here on the Point to not worry about adequate food. They may still have to worry about their rent or their car insurance or their gasoline, but at least, there’s help with food. However, that help doesn't just arrive from the sky: the Food Bank has to solicit help from the community both in terms of funds and in terms of time in procuring, storing, packaging, and delivering the food.

People always talk about how generous Americans are, and I’m sure they are when they see some need for generosity standing right in front of them. But people who need some help with food don’t stand in front of you and ask for help. Who stands in front of you, at least at this moment, is somebody who once could have used some help but had no one to ask. I was lucky and found another way out. For those who aren’t so lucky, who don’t have a lot of job experience, education, work savvy, and a good job market…well, they are still there needing help. Money, a permanent storage space for food, and actual time spent picking up, packaging, distributing food: all of that is needed by the Point Roberts Food Bank. If you are here on the Point, think about offering to help.

Getting and Spending

We are all economists now. It astonishes me how all the news—radio, print, internet, magazines, telegrams, whatever—assume that we are deeply interested in and follow closely the stock market, the jobless numbers, the GDP, and all that. In the olden days, when economics really was the dismal science, we left all that to the economists. In the public sector, they did what they did to keep things more or less humming along. There was a business cycle when things were good and a lot of engineers were being hired, and then there would come along the part of the cycle when things were bad and all the engineers lost their jobs. The market went up, the market went down. But people like me (the middle class) really didn’t pay all that much attention to it.

But just start the sentence, “The economy …” and everybody now has a dozen ways to finish the sentence. We act as if we knew what the 'economy’ is, or was, or might be. This month’s issue of Harper’s (and let me confess that if Harper’s were a church, I would join it) has an extremely helpful article on what we talk about when we talk about the economy. It is by Jonathan Rowe and is titled ‘Our Phony Economy.’ You might be able to read it here, but it might be available under subscription only.

In any case, what Rowe is talking about is what the economy is and what the economy isn’t, and when he said all this (in March), he was actually talking to some subset of the U.S. Congress. One reason to care about this is because of the rebate checks currently being sent out to most U.S. taxpayers to make up for the fact that the housing market has collapsed and there’s the credit crunch and all that. We have become, in the last fifty years or so, nothing more than a nation of consumers. No longer are we freedom-loving Americans, or wild and crazy Americans, or an independent and hopeful people, or a resourceful and inventive people, or any of that stuff. We are just a nation of spenders, and when times get hard, when the engineers lose their jobs, our job is not to knuckle down, to help one another through the difficulties, to cut back, to scrimp and save, etc. No, our job is to spend some more and if the hard times we are going through make it difficult to spend some more, than the government will send you some money (which it, of course, doesn’t actually have but is borrowing from the Chinese, who are getting tired of lending to us) and they will tell you to spend it on whatever you desire.

What is wrong with this picture? How can the economy improve from almost random spending? Will we be better off for spending our rebates on additional driving, buying gas that will go to oil companies and Middle Eastern treasuries? Or on vacations or casino gambling or pricey handbags or any of the things we buy? There are people who really may need this money and I expect they’ll be spending it on food and heating oil and gas to get to work. But a large chunk of the recipients are in no such need and the cash that is coming to them might be better sent to their local food banks (who have had substantial increases in numbers of people who are asking for help right at the time that food prices are going up significantly). Or they ought to put it in the bank for their children and grandchildren who will, of course, be the ones who have to repay the money when the Treasury Notes come due. No, that’s no good: it has to be spent now. For the good of the economy. For the good of the country, we could at least spend it on something worthy of spending. I vote for the Food Bank.