While thirty-five million Americans feel the physical effects of hunger each day, every household and individual in our nation feels the economic effects. So finds a new study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and researchers affiliated with Harvard University School of Public Health, Brandeis University and Loyola University.
The study found that the lion's share of the overall cost, $66.8 billion, resulted from illness associated with hunger, said Brandeis health economist Donald Shepard, who led the economic analysis. These illnesses included iron deficiency, colds and depression, and other causes of fair and poor health.
"What was unusual about hunger was the wide range of problems associated with it, which included not only the illness burden, but also expenses on food pantries and other charities to mitigate the problem, and lost productivity due to hunger's adverse impact on learning,"
This is another area where the super-rich elite are whining about conditions for which they are at least partly the cause. They hold down wages to poverty levels for many of their employees, so that they themselves can make an amount that they can have no real use for. They make huge political donations to political candidates to vote to remove taxes from themselves and shift it to the poor and middle-class. This means there is less money for such things as educations and health care for the less advantaged. They fund "think tanks" to support their positions. They inflence the news media because of their advertising power. Also, they control the big media.
Then they complain that they can't get well-educated, intelligent employees.
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