The right uses the former group to claim that welfare programs are overly generous, and can be scaled back. The left uses the latter group to claim that the safety net is barely adequate, and should be strengthened. I'm more inclined to agree with the left; I'd rather the safety net was a bit too cushy for some than that people went hungry. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.

Of course, politicians regularly try to tweak welfare to reduce both extremes. But reality is too complex, and you always end up with some people not getting enough while others get more than they need.

In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.

This does not mean people aren't getting enough to eat. The human body responds in very predictable ways to food consumption - do waistline measurements suggest anyone is lacking food?

You seem to be focussing on the correlation between poverty and obesity. That's well known, but there are a couple of key differences from the discussion at hand:

First, the poorest category is generally quite broad. I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. The fact that obesity is more prevalent overall in that bracket doesn't mean that everyone in it gets enough to eat.

Secondly, getting the food you need isn't just about calorie intake. After all, a cup of vegetable oil has almost all the calories you need for a day. People need a balanced diet, including vitamins and protein and so on. So waistline measurements alone aren't enough to determine how many people aren't getting adequate food. News stories such as tinyurl.com/cqw7r43 suggest that poorer households are cutting back on fruit and veg as money gets tighter.

Finally, when people can't afford enough food, they are likely to turn to unconventional sources like foodbanks and dumpster diving. That people need to rely on charity and scavenging is a failure of society. We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.

That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income <$20k has consumption of approximately $20k.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.

Are people even becoming slightly less fat? That will happen long before anyone starves.

Have you considered how easy it is to stuff yourself with simple carbohydrates? Do you

For example, someone I knew in high school (a number of years ago now) qualified for the school lunch program, so nominally his family was poor. But they lived in a house, with a yard; had cable TV, computers, and Internet. I would say they're working-class, or maybe even lower middle-class.

If the lowest-income 20% of the population is labeled as poor for the purposes of this statistic ("nominal poor"), but the number of people who are so poor their children are starving in the streets ("desperately poor") is 0.20% of the population, then it's not so surprising that statistics over the nominal poor much more closely resemble the general population than the picture of the desperately poor.

http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html

Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.

The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)

One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)

Sources:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/foo... for the definition of food insecurity levels.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... for the 1% number.

Job seekers allowance (the standard benefit for the unemployed) will net you around £50 per week. Out of that has to come all of your expenses including energy , food , travel etc. You may be able to get rent covered by separate housing benefits.

Of course the right wing press will often print examples of families on benefit who are pulling in large sums of money from the taxpayer. I think in most cases these are cherry picked cases.

You do of course get more money if you have children, so perhaps if one can produce enough children to benefit from economies of scale it becomes more likely.

Our family live on far less than that each per week after housing and we're working ... clearly we're not doing it right but it seems that is more than sufficient. Indeed my experience is that those I know on benefits can afford to live quite badly, wastefully.

By the time I've used Energy/Gas + Internet + transport I've taken a huge bite out of that, not to mention food , phone etc.

x2 for 2 wage earners.

$1/day(!) per person is another $5 each.

Replacing worn out clothes adds a touch.

Water/sewer is ~$5/wk/person for very light use. Energy for light/heat/cooking is similar.

That is bare minimum for survival.

(There is one exception to this - tall muscular people. This is a known problem with BMI.)

It's also a product of low exercise (common if you're scraping by with two minimum-wage jobs), depression (common when you're poor), eating (cheap) junk food instead of fruits and vegetables, etc.

I successfully maintain a healthy bodyweight through periods of low exercise (typically resulting from injury). Right now I put in the effort to eat 4500 (reasonably clean) cals/day. When I'm unable to train, I cut it to 3000.

People suffering depression may choose gluttony at a rate higher than others, but that doesn't mean depression causes obesity. Gluttony does.

If a person were truly financially constrained, they couldn't engage in gluttony if they wanted to.

Are you saying that it's impossible to be malnourished and obese?

If so, that's provably untrue.

From what I've read, the primary diet-related medical problems that the poor suffer are diabetes, heart disease, and similar things. Scurvy and B12 deficiency are very far down on their list of problems.

Feel free to do a google search and prove me wrong.

Ah, the T-bone steaks and Cadillacs meme.

This statement surprises me, as it contradicts a lot of what I've heard of poverty in the US.

Do you have a citation or several I could look at?

Five minutes' Googling will make it abundantly clear that "they're fat because they have a moral failing" is a seriously unhelpful point of view.

(For anyone interested - the phrase "obesity-poverty paradox" is a good place to start.)