Hamas endorses Obama

[Drolefille]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

I guess I'm reluctant to agree that we have people starving who the government could actually help, and I think that our actual problem with food for the poor runs more to problems with their eating foods with high caloric content but not particularly good nutritional value, largely because individuals are provided with choice in the food they get.

It's not something you agree with or don't, it's fact. You're thinking of a stereotype of urban poor.
http://www.secondharvest.org/who_we_...ger_facts.html
This is about elderly people living on fixed incomes, people who cannot support themselves on the wages available, urban and rural.

The people who are starving are people, as much as I know, who because of their own poor mental health, drug use, or illegal immigration status won't seek the help from the community that is available. I suppose we could add ignorance about the assistance available. For example, we've got free or reduced price lunch programs in every public school, and if the needs at a particular school are high enough, they often have breakfast programs as well. We have food stamps, and charity food banks too.

So the mentally ill don't deserve food? These things are wonderful if you live in a large enough city to support them and have transportation etc. Your perspective is very very focused on one portion of the population. See the links above about people in America who resort to eating clay.

I think the number of starving people in the US who seek help, especially from government funded social services, who are turned away with no food or referrals to other services is probably really tiny. But if they don't know who to ask or how to get the help, it's hard to figure out how all the social programs, especially bureaucratically administrated government ones, will really make anything better.

So you're for the social programs run by the government? And if those aren't adequately meeting the needs of the population you'd be for expanding them so they are?

I stand by my claim that people imagine that the world hates us for the very issues that those individuals don't like about ourselves whatever those might be, and while any of us might disagree with a particular reason or set of reasons, there's no way to know what changes we could make that would make people hate us less.

... I cannot follow that sentence. People in the world hate us for different reasons, but you cannot exclude reasons because they don't fit your worldview.

(In general, I agree that our recent foreign policy makes us seem arrogant. Would you educate me about what debts we haven't paid internationally? If it's anything other than basically funding the UN ourselves, I'm interested in learning about it.)

Monetary as well as other promises we make, but you do realize that 25% of our national debt is in the hands of foreign countries right?

We also do owe the UN 1.246 billion dollars because Congress thinks its fun not to pay in order to try and make the UN do what we want. We currently pay 22% of the UN's budget because they have a "ability to pay" scale. This does not make use "basically funding the UN ourselves"