Don't Ask How to Feed People, Ask How to End Poverty
This article in NYT speaks the truth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/dont-ask-how-to-feed-the-9-billion.html
However, the reason people always want to frame the problem in terms of the economics of scarcity is solving the problem of poverty - doing anything for the greater good of the "public" really - involves redistribution. It involves transferring wealth from people who have it (perhaps unfairly, perhaps even through cheating and theft) to people who need it.
Our civilization has advanced to the point where it's gauche to simply not care about people starving in the streets and being made vulnerable to the most terrible forms of exploitation by their need, so the wealthy like to rearrange things in their head so as not to see poverty as need. They will instead see character flaws like laziness, bad decisions and irresponsibility, mental illness, welfare queens and scammers, corruption that's causing problems in what's otherwise a perfectly good system, problems they can't do anything about, "the poor will always be with us", or they choose to turn a blind eye and not see people in need at all. Sadly no one seems too worried about the poor actually rising up in violent protest of the conditions in which they have been subjected to.
Political activity at the local level seems to be increasingly discouraged as the GoP are hyper-aware that the first thing people in need will do if they use their votes is "vote money to themselves". In other words, people in need who are politically empowered and don't have the wool pulled over their eyes some how will vote for some sort of redistribution.
That said, there is some question over how this redistribution will occur. Will it largely be conducted indirectly through the building of infrastructure and the delivering of services like universal healthcare, so it won't look like specific people are getting "handouts"? Will people get tax refunds that feel like they are getting something back for paying into the system? Will the money go into shoring up social security and our eldercare resources? Will we demand the creation of phony jobs so it will look like we're "working" for our money and so all the moral philosophers in the peanut gallery be happy? Would we fund free trade schools and public universities and take a serious bite out of the welfare system as we routed people through schools instead? Could we have subsidized housing, keyed to income, everywhere?
The amelioration of poverty can only happen through SOME form of redistribution. It's a dirty word, but someone has to say it. Gruber, of ACA faux pas fame, got into trouble because he felt the American people couldn't deal with this concept. If Democrats want to do anything about poverty, they should stop doing the two-step around this implicit logic - and they definitely shouldn't try to obfuscate what they are doing in a lot of legalese. Just OWN it. Lay out where the money was stolen and take a little of it back on behalf of the American people.
Also, people in the activism world should be focusing GOTV efforts among people in need and teaching them that the vote is the way they ultimately change their circumstances and get their needs met. They should raise awareness of the long term connections between policies that affect redistribution and the way those ultimately shape the world we live in. We joke about how "all politics is local", but is it anymore? Do people feel very engaged with their local politics, especially the neediest constituents who are largely ignored because they can't make donations to candidates. Maybe they can't donate, but they can still vote.
Shifting the landscape of poverty in the US should become a prominent feature of the Democratic agenda if we don't want to look like "the other Republicans".
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