rdmcandie wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
The point being made in that case was that the difference in actual food a given family ate was not significantly affected based on whether they received food stamps or not
Actually it doesn't say that at all in fact it says the exact opposite really.
Article wrote:
A thorough 2004 USDA literature review summarized the large body of research showing that food stamp benefits substantially raise food spending, may raise nutrient availability in household food supplies, and cannot be shown to consistently affect individual nutrient intake
The problem with selectively quoting articles is that you get the luxury of jumbling up all the facts.
And the problem with having poor reading comprehension is that you will consistently fail to understand the facts being presented to you. Even when you selectively quote them, you still fail.
One of the two bolded parts from the article matches the bolded part in the quote from me. Can you see which one it is?
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The main meat to this article was based off a survey conducted by the USDA in 2004, in 2004 it was deemed that the survey was unable to quantify what people were actually eating. It states that while it shows that an increased amount of food was available to the household, it is undetermined as to an individuals intake.
First off, the article draws from a set of different studies. Secondly, even the bit you quoted stated that while families
spent more on food (ie: spent the food stamps), it didn't affect the
amount they actually ate. What part of me saying that people get the food stamps at the beginning of the month, go on a spending binge, mostly for stuff that isn't cost effective or particularly nutritious, and then run out of food at the end of the month did you miss?
I never said that they didn't have sufficient funds to buy enough food to feed themselves. In fact, I said repeatedly that they did. However, they make choices during the course of a month that results in them running short at the end of the month, and that this habit seems to occur whether you provide them with food stamps or not, and regardless of how much food stamps you give them.
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This survey has nothing to do with what people eat. It only asks if they feel secure in providing food to their families.
That's not really what "food insecurity" means though:
Article wrote:
“Food security†is defined as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life†(9). “Food insecurity†is defined as the absence of food security at the household level.
If a household cannot ensure that all family members have enough food all the time, then that household is experiencing "food insecurity". It's not about whether they have enough money to have enough food all the time, but whether they actually have enough food all the time. My whole point is that these are two different things. My argument is that people tend to run out of money to buy enough food at the end of the month, even if they did have enough at the beginning to have done so if they'd budgeted correctly. Hence my point that people make poor choices which leads to this outcome.
And nearly every fact in that article supports my argument.
Quote:
Gbaji wrote:
You missed the point I was making *and* the point of the study I linked. The degree to which a given family suffers "food insecurity" does not appear to change at all based on whether we provide them with food stamps.
Compared to what? This study did not ask equally impoverished people who are not on food stamps what their food security is like. There is no possible way you can make that claim using the data you provided, and there is no support at all for your claim in the data provided.
Huh? Compared to how much they receive, and whether they receive it at all:
Article wrote:
Only 60% of eligible people choose to participate (14), and those who suffer from hunger are more likely to take the trouble to participate. As a consequence, even if one restricts attention to the population of households with income below 130% of the poverty line, the prevalence of food insecurity with hunger is about twice as high among food stamp participants as among nonparticipant households (Fig. 1). This self-selection or self-targeting pattern has been noted many times in the recent literature (8,9,15,16). Efforts to address this problem with more complex statistical approaches have generated a series of interesting papers and articles that shed light on the self-selection pattern but do not in the end succeed in quantifying the effect of food stamps on food insecurity and hunger. This section reviews 7 such research approaches.
The first approach is to control for other observable variables while seeking to measure the effect of FSP participation in a regression model. However, several studies have found that prevalences of food insecurity or hunger remain much higher for participants than for nonparticipants even after including control variables in this fashion (17,18).
Do I have to do your reading for you? What this is saying is that when comparing people who are below 130% of the poverty line, the incidence of "food insecurity with hunger" was *higher* among those who received food stamps than those who did not. But since that can be a selection bias, several studies have attempted to account for that bias, but have still found that people are more likely to be food insecure and/or suffer hunger if they are receiving food stamps compared to if they aren't, even among the same income range.
The problem is that all the evidence suggests that food stamps actually may be making the problem worse, not better. I'm even giving the studies the benefit of the doubt here by taking the far more middle position and just saying that they don't seem to be helping much. They're trying to prove that food stamps actually help despite data to the contrary, and at best have come up with inconclusive results. That's what this article is about.
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All this shows is that despite food stamps, people are still below the US governments standard for food security. That is it. That is the only thing this entire article says.
No. It's saying that at best recipients of food stamps are no better off in terms of food security than non-recipients in the same income range, and at worse may actually be worse off. You completely failed to actually read and understand the article.
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Yes because the article you shared does not support any of your words, it states pretty blatantly that it can't define these things.
Wrong. The article does support what I'm saying. What it states blatantly is that it examined a number of studies attempting to counter the data showing that food stamps don't help prevent food insecurity, and could not find any conclusive evidence that this was the case. Meaning that none of the studies which attempted to prove that food stamps really did help people avoid hunger could prove that they did. Get it?
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This article clearly does not say what you think it says. There is no data on comparison to income brackets on food stamps vs those same income brackets not on food stamps.
False. I just quoted where they did exactly that comparison. Did you actually read the article?
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Which is a pretty @#%^ing important statistic in determining the argument of "The degree to which a given family suffers "food insecurity" does not appear to change at all based on whether we provide them with food stamps."
Yes, it is. Which is why you should have read the article.
Edited, Jan 15th 2013 1:57pm by gbaji 
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