Let's Be Real: Nobody's Starving Here in the United States.

Nobody is starving in the United States, unless they're being held captive in a pit in someone's basement in some weird "Silence of the Lambs" scenario. One of, if not the biggest, health problems facing the American poor is obesity, and no, I'm not buying the old line about decent food being too expensive. Some of the most affordable groceries one can buy include bulk rice, beans, and lean turkey, which can make for some pretty healthful meals. I'm not buying the canard about poor people not having time to cook, either, because they are working nine jobs just to get by. Anyone with that kind of gumption won't be below the poverty line for long, for one thing.

That hasn't stopped Axios from proclaiming, in a recent article, that more and more American adults are going hungry. The problem is, as an editorial at Issues & Insights points out, it just isn't true.

A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”
The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”
But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?

Here's the chart:

Look at the years. pic.twitter.com/rcJpQRRYT9
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) July 11, 2025

As I&I points out:

Morning Consult started tracking “food insecurity” in 2021. And, sure enough, it was on the rise – the entire time Joe Biden was president.
Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.

Let's also point out that this is just polling data. There's nothing in any of this that is traced to actual, reproducible work on health care trends. This "data" is pure fluff and fuzz. There's nothing in there about increased (or decreased) data on any health issues attributed to malnutrition. There's nothing about the increasing cases of any of the various syndromes that can come about due to hunger. And Axios still manages to get it wrong!

Obesity, on the other hand, is a serious and growing concern among America's poor.

Back to the fluff and fuzz:

Food insecurity was high for most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, went steadily down in Trump’s first term, then spiked under Biden. (Interestingly, food stamp enrollment also went up under Obama, came down under Trump, then rose again under Biden.)

Could this be because the Obama and Biden administrations kept up a non-stop drumbeat about hunger in America? During the Obama administration, the Department of Agriculture was actually advertising the food stamp program on television and radio, pushing it as a food security measure.

Meanwhile, fraud and waste in that system were endemic. We've all heard the stories of people paying for carts full of sugary snacks and premium meats with their SNAP benefits, but sometimes that fraud has been on an industrial scale.

SNAP Crackdown: Trump Ag Secretary Ensures Illegal Aliens Can't Access Federal Food Benefits

There is no starvation in the United States, because there is little or no absolute poverty in the United States - only relative poverty. American poor people are some of the richest people on the planet, in fact. That does not, however, mean that the SNAP (food stamp) program couldn't be fixed, or at least improved. Two angles should be changed in this program:

1) Incentives. Remember when food stamps were just that? Paper coupons? We should go back to that. Make it visible. There should be some slight societal onus involved in soaking the taxpayers for your supper. The incentive should be to get off the program, not to lounge on it.

2) Limits on what can be purchased. No soda pop, no candy, no frozen pizzas, no prepared pastries. Flour, rice, beans, lean turkey, things like that. Hand out free pamphlets on how to prepare them, if need be. Healthy food, not junk. And to those who will proclaim that "We can't tell people what they can and can't eat," I can only respond, "When we're paying for it, we can, and we should." Frankly, I'd rather see people having to line up every week for a government food-bank issue instead, but we're probably not going to get that.

Being on any public welfare program should be a trifle embarrassing. There should be some societal onus on it. And the incentives should be to get off these programs. The late, great Rush Limbaugh was fond of pointing out that Democrats measure success by how many people are on public assistance, while Republicans measure it by how many people no longer need it. That should be the focus, and any conclusions drawn should be based on actual, documented health trends, not fuzzy feelings about "food insecurity."

DOGE is finding billions of dollars in wasteful spending, and the Democrats are losing their minds as they realize their gravy train and woke projects are coming to an end.

Please help us continue to report on DOGE's accomplishments and expose leftist corruption. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.