The state Legislature has approved a bill that would create a “Community Food Pantry Fund” that would distribute money to community food pantries through the state’s food purchase program. The money would be generated by a voluntary check off on state tax returns and the money would be used to be food.
It’s a decent — if only partial — solution, maintaining the current charity structure but simplifying both donation and distribution.
The legislators who sponsored the bill — Democrats Gordon Johnson, Wayne DeAngelo, Elease Evans, Albert Coutinho and Herb Conaway — said in a press release that the legislation would address hunger issues by taking advantage of New Jerseyans’ generosity.
“The global economic meltdown means hunger isn’t being limited to the poor,” said Johnson (D-Bergen). “New Jersey is a generous state, and we can and should make it easier to spread that generosity and do whatever we can to ensure no one in this state goes to bed hungry.”
“The global economic crisis is hitting our state hard and may get worse,” DeAngelo (D-Mercer) said. “People who never thought they would ever visit a food pantry are now relying on them to put food on the table for their families. These are tough times, and anything we can do to make it easier for people to help those less fortunate is a good thing.”
I’m glad to see the legislation pass — and I expect the governor to sign it shortly — but as I said, this is just a half measure. State and federal governments — which are the people’s representatives, an extension of the citizenry — have a responsibility to take care of those who get battered by our poorly structured economy, which is set up to favor people with money and tosses aside those deemed expendable.
The cyclical nature of our economy in which the booms are inevitably followed by busts leaves each of us vulnerable. It has become a cliché that most of us are one misfortune — a lost job, a health-care crisis, a divorce — away from a visit to the soup kitchen.
This leaves private charitable organizations vulnerable, as well. When the money dries up donors tend not to contribute, leaving the mostly private agencies that act as our de facto safety net with less money and food to distribute at a time when more money and food is being requested.
It is the reason why government programs like Social Security and welfare, unemployment and disability insurance, food stamps and school lunch programs, Medicare and Medicaid and the other New Deal and Great Society programs we have come to rely on were created.
We dismantled much of it over the last 30 years, stigmatizing the poor and others in need and leaving it to the private, underfunded and understaffed agencies to take care of what is a very public problem.
The thing to do, if we hadn’t gutted our ability to generate revenue, if we had not made taxes a bad word and turned government into a pejorative, would be to rebuild what we’ve deconstructed, to fix what we’ve broken. Government has its uses and one of its most important is to protect its citizens, and not just from crime of a terrorist attack, but from corporate greed and the vicissitudes of the irrational marketplace.
