EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/The fat and the hungry
Everything is bigger in Texas, but having recently been named America’s fattest city, Houston would have to agree that bigger isn’t always better. Houston, of course, isn’t alone in spreading out — most Americans are fat. Currently, 127 million adult Americans are either overweight or obese.
Adding to an expanding national food problem is the growing number of hungry people. As many as 31 million American men, women and children are hungry or unsure where their next meals will come from. Our once great land of plenty now means plenty of fat people and plenty of hungry people.
Hunger in America can trace its roots to a lack of affordable housing and increased unemployment, according to the most recent U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) survey of hunger and homelessness. In its survey of 25 cities, USCM reports that emergency requests for food increased by an average of 17 percent last year while requests for emergency shelter increased by an average of 13 percent.
The poverty rate has been increasing, too, according to the most recent Census Bureau reports. The official poverty measure indicates that about 1.7 million more people were in poverty in 2002 than in 2001 — 34.6 million versus 32.9 million. At the same time, median household income declined 1.1 percent in real terms from 2001 to 2002. Our bonus for those gruesome facts is the industrialized world’s worst child poverty rate and worst life expectancy rate.
Underlying all those statistics is a growing gap in income. The Congressional Budget Office reports that the average after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans grew by $414,000, or 157 percent, between 1979 and 1997, while the middle class income grew $3,400 or 10 percent. The poorest 20 percent of Americans’ average after-tax income actually fell $100 during that time.
Possibly one of the reasons that our politics have become so divisive in the past several years is because our people are finding themselves more isolated in a caste-like way. A more poignant manifestation of that phenomenon is the fact that the two fastest growing types of communities are gated communities and communities of concentrated poverty, according to Charlie Lyons, the National League of Cities president.
In the November issue of American City & County, Lyons also said that the same number of people — eight million — live in gated and concentrated-poverty communities. Helping to increase the gap between Americans, he said, is that two-thirds of all new jobs are being created in the suburbs, while three-fourths of welfare recipients live in urban and rural areas.
Just like the increasing numbers of fat people in this country, clearly there is a widening, unhealthy social and economic gap between Americans that must be addressed at every level of government. If we don’t address the issues, having too many fat people will be the least of our problems.