When social programs are slashed and gutted as the result of "cost cutting", it never occurs to those holding scissors that the effects of those cuts can be long range and damaging and in the end, more costly than if they remained in place. But no. Knee-jerk responses and feel-good instant remedies are more attractive politically, particularly to the ones so distanced from the problems those social programs were introduced to fix.
Dr. Jean Mayer, long an advocate of good nutrition and ways of stopping hunger in the world was interviewed in this episode of Face The Nation from December 26, 1982.
Dr. Jean Mayer: “The survey that was done in ’78-’79 by the same physicians and scientists who had done the survey in ’68-’69 had found that, in effect hunger, malnutrition due to poverty had disappeared and that clearly the food programs were responsible, because it had happened even in places where there had been no economic improvement. At present, with the steady hacking away at the food programs, we are seeing hunger reappear in the United States, and I am very worried that some of the conquests of the ‘70’s are going to be lost.”
His fears were certainly well-grounded as was evidenced by the steady rise in malnutrition in this country in the 1980's. It was the direct result of cutting programs that eradicated that problem only a few years earlier. One imagines the reasoning behind the cuts was, people were eating healthy so they didn't need that aspect of the social program any more.
I keep forgetting politics and logic have nothing to do with each other.
