The DU Lounge

Drink, except for one cup of tea at breakfast. Perhaps you only use tap water. I can assure you that is not a choice available to many, many citizens where the water that comes out of the tap is undrinkable. I suppose one could compensate for that by using the military filters which are very cheap and good for several hundred gallons -- if he knows about them and can get them. In any event, if you are drinking only tap water, that would increase your water bill by some non-zero amount which should rightly be added to the computation of the price of the daily ration. Of course, the price of water is something that varies greatly with one's location.

That's a checklist for one person. Try it with a family of four, some of whom are children and probably need more protein and vitamins.

In the larger sense, something missing is perhaps the willingness to ask the question: why should one be pinching pennies to feed themselves and their family when they have a full-time job in what is supposed to be the richest country in the world?

This is the part of all "austerity" arguments that baffles me. The ruling class claims a crisis and demands that everyone else suffer to combat it. They pay no price at all. Whether it's 15 or 20 dollars a day to feed one person is not really the issue. The real issue is how much that 15-20 dollars is as a portion of the individual's income.

-- Mal