HB2091: Hunger relief in Arkansas
I'll be presenting HB2091 to Joint Budget soon, which appropriates $100,000 for hunger relief projects statewide.Here are some Arkansas statistics that detail numbers on the segment of our society that can't afford enough food to keep their family alive. These figures are from www.census.gov and the 2004 American Community Survey.
To read more about the Hunger Relief Alliance, click to read this 2006 report (Texarkana figures are on page six). You can read a more detailed report here, which includes needed resources that this bill addresses in order to feed thousands of Arkansas families in need.- Over 17% of Arkansans live below the federal poverty line. That means that 1 in 6 of our neighbors struggles with making ends meet and providing enough food for their family. - ACS Survey
- Our childhood poverty rate is 25.9% compared to the national average of 18.4%. - ACS Survey
- 1 in 8 of our elderly citizens lives below the poverty line and has to choose between food and medicine. - ACS Survey
- Arkansas is ranked in the top 5 of most food insecure states.
- The regions in our state with the greatest prosperity will experience the greatest increase in poverty by 2010.
posted by Steve Harrelson @ 3/08/2007 07:27:00 AM | Permalink |
3 Comments:
Congratulations to you for sponsoring this bill and best wishes for getting it enacted. I wish we had more legislators like you working for the people who cannot fight for themselves instead of those who too often seek to curry favor with the wealthy.
Thank you for this effort Steve. I am on the board of AHRA and am very appreciative that you are doing this.
We are still a very young organization and this kind of effort is absolutely necessary. Please keep up the good work and God bless you!
Michael Heathcott
Fort Smith
Sigh. I guess I am just coming from this from a completely different view of the world than most people- a biblical view. I know this sounds good, but socialism sounds good. It's drawback is not that it doesn't sound good, it's that it doesn't work!
The follow is from the charter or platform of an as-yet-unborn organization that some of us are considering starting up....
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The message of Christian charity is fundamentally at odds with the concept of welfare maintenance as a right. In many cases, welfare provisions by the government are not only misdirected, but morally destructive. It is the intended purpose of civil government to safeguard life, liberty and property - not to redistribute wealth. Such redistribution is contrary to the Biblical commands against theft and coveting.
When individuals help the poor of their own free will it produces an environment where the wealthy care for the poor as people, and the poor care for and are grateful toward the wealthy for the giving. When the state steps in and does charity by compulsion, both the joy of giving and the gratitude of receiving are lost. The givers become distant from, and resentful of, the getters. The getters become ungrateful and lose their incentive to serve others better. Instead an “entitlement mentality” takes hold as various groups assert their “rights” to the earnings of their fellow-citizens. The biblical pattern of charitable giving produces connection and healing. The government pattern produces strife, animosity, and division.
We encourage individuals, families, churches, civic groups and other private organizations, to fulfill their personal responsibility to help those in need.
We hold our current welfare state to be a judgment of God on this nation because too many of our citizens have rejected God and His call for them as individuals to be charitable to the poor. Because of this, we cannot sharply reduce government welfare unless the moral capital is in place to permit it. Instead, we call for a halt to any additional social spending, unless a new program is matched by cuts in other social programs of equal or greater cost. In determining which programs to protect and which to reduce, our bias should be toward programs that help people whose need for assistance is a result of misfortune, and not of their own poor moral choices.
We call for a generational build-up of church and private charitable giving to wean our fellow citizens from the welfare trap. The current growth of the nanny welfare state is unsustainable and its collapse is inevitable. It would be an act of unimaginable cruelty to continue growing it until millions more were duped into helplessness and dependency on a system that is certain to fail.
We call for a change in tax laws that allow for more prosperous citizens to take current welfare recipients into their homes as servants of that household, in order that they may gain true independence by learning to serve others well. We further call for changes in tax law that would allow for individuals to take a tax credit to directly provide for a person from off the public dole from their own bounty, individual to individual.
We reject so-called “Faith Based Initiatives” on the grounds that the government as provider of charity is an intrinsically unbiblical approach. The answer is a generational movement away from government dependency, not expanding the reach of the nanny state in a way that turns the churches into the paid servants of the state, in violation of the first amendment. The churches are obligated to God to keep themselves free from government largesse so that they might be unhindered in their efforts to hold accountable leaders who violate God’s standards for civil government.
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