True but AFAIK no other countries are spending their tax money providing food aid to the USA?

I agree our own poverty situation is awful, but honestly that's another reason to not be spending tax money the US International Food Aid Program. What if we spent that ~1.2 billion each year on feeding our hungry children, trying to reduce the number of families in poverty etc..?

Countries (including India) donate to the US during times of disaster (Katrina). Not exactly the same thing, but worth pointing out.

The US gets a lot of value from having a friend in the region. Especially one with the military capabilities that India has.

But really, my point is that we live in a complicated world. It's idealistic (naive?) to think "how silly, people are starving yet they have a space program or a nuclear program?!" Science and energy aren't wasteful places to be spending money. Frankly, we live in a world where military spending can hardly be seen as wasteful.

The donations during Katrina were meant to be understood as moral support. These donations were not to be misunderstood as a claim that the US would have been incapable of dealing with Katrina by themselves.

>>not to be misunderstood as a claim that the US would have been incapable of dealing with Katrina by themselves.

Oh, yes sure.

But if somebody in my neighborhood dies, I lend them shoulder so that they cry in comfort. Not that they are incapable of dealing with their loss. But because that's how friends treat each other. With compassion and are always there for each other during times of need.

Yes, but this relation is not symmetric, which is where the OP's question comes in

It depends, you could spend $1.2Bn on feeding the people of various third world countries or you could spend $6.7Bn/Month on bombing just one of them - not sure which is going to gain you more friends and influence, but neither is going to do much for a poor kid in Alabama

I agree with you, I wonder why someone downvoted / flagged your post. The US has 1000+ bases around the world and spends a lot of money maintaining troops in "friendly" countries and client states (Middle East puppet regimes) and occupying and bombing other countries. The real total "defense budget" including all the offensive actions, DoD, Pentagon, TSA etc is more than $1 trillion (that's $1000 billion, or $1000,000 million). All of that could be spent at home but we'd rather bomb / liberate those civilians than to spend money on healthcare of our elderly or food or education of our kids.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/02/20/the-real-us-military-budg...

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/us-govt-ran--13-trillion-budget-d...

The Federal Reserve has printed trillions of dollars and given it to their buddy banksters and have no trail of it, and we the taxpayers have to pay it back by inflation. Poor suckers who saved for their retirements can go to hell.

http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2009/05/14/federal-reser...

End the corporate bailouts, bring the US military budget to a sane level, end the subsidies for big oil and gas, end the subsidies to banksters and we'll have enough to feed all the kids and the poor and provide universal healthcare.

Bank of America Pays No Taxes, Gets $1B Refund: Report http://www.thestreet.com/story/11059978/bank-of-america-pays...

Bank of America, GE Pay Zero Federal Taxes http://publicintelligence.net/bank-of-america-ge-pay-zero-fe...

Bank of America, Citigroup, GM paid no taxes http://www.standard.net/topics/opinion/2011/04/04/bank-ameri...

Federal Reserve Cannot Account For $9 Trillion http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2009/05/14/federal-reser...

We all pay for the research but when it's time for profits it's "capitalism" because socialism is evil!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies A 2009 study by the Environmental Law Institute[5] assessed the size and structure of U.S. energy subsidies over the 2002–2008 period. The study estimated that subsidies to fossil-fuel based sources amounted to approximately $72 billion over this period and subsidies to renewable fuel sources totaled $29 billion. The study did not assess subsidies supporting nuclear energy.

The three largest fossil fuel subsidies were:

Foreign tax credit ($15.3 billion) Credit for production of non-conventional fuels ($14.1 billion) Oil and Gas exploration and development expensing ($7.1 billion) The three largest renewable fuel subsidies were:

Alcohol Credit for Fuel Excise Tax ($11.6 billion) Renewable Electricity Production Credit ($5.2 billion) Corn-Based Ethanol ($5.0 billion)

I was going to sarcastically reply that my apartment building also wasn't holding a fundraiser for the robber barons on wall street until I remembered that we already did.

Also, you are aware that in 2011 the usa spent .86 trillion dollars on the military and wars? Maybe we should go after that for food aid before complaining about a paltry billion donated from the richest country in the world to our fellow human beings.

Agreed 100%, but arguing about military spending seems pretty tangential to the main discussion here, whereas the food aid program is directly relevant.

Amen to that! It's more like $1 trillion or $1.3 or more, see my response below. And we need to go after the banksters and big oil and gas that take away more than enough money that could be used to balance our budget before we talk about aid that is a fraction of a percentage of our GDP.

The definition of poverty in the US and India is a little different, in the USA it means a family income of less than $43,512 a year - in India it means dying of starvation.

Not wishing to belittle the struggle of so many US families - but this isn't quite the same thing.

The poverty level in the us is $23 050 for a family of 4 (1). Not sure where you got your figure.

Roughly 10% of americans were food-insecure at some point in a year (2)

(1) http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/12poverty.shtml

(2) http://webarchives.cdlib.org/sw1s17tt5t/http://ers.usda.gov/...

Yes, in India ~50% of the population doesn't have regular access to clean water or a sewage system. Yes, I'd rather be poor in the US than poor in India. But I maintain that the state of poverty in the US (and other western countries) is a far bigger failure than the state of poverty in any developing country.

Also, I can't help but link to this great post whenever talking about poverty:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

the mac and cheese one makes me tear up every time I read it.

Food insecurity in the US is meaningless. The definition is so broad it encompasses all sorts of ridiculous situations.

Consider a morbidly obese person who eats 6 cheeseburgers/day. At dinner time on the 30'th day of the month (payday is the 1'st of next month) they run out of money, and are only able to purchase 4 cheeseburgers that day. By the definition of the USDA, this person is food insecure.

Comparing poverty in the US to poverty in India is a misnomer - poor people in the US are actually richer than the rich (top 5%) in India. I say this based on both personal experience and statistics: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

The article by Scalzi you cite does not describe the poor in the US. I debunk it (with stats) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461

Food insecurity at some point in a year is not at all the same thing as starvation.

That does not sound like the correct number for the US poverty line. Where did you get it from?

Sorry my mistake, it was from a lobbying group website and is 2x the "official" US poverty level income figure. Their point being that even at 200% of the official figure it's still pretty tough, which is certainly true.

Their site was one of these "thinktanks" that appear to be an official government agency until you look very closely.