Do The Math
I attended the Waterloo Region Food Summit keynote last night and learned quite a bit about food banks and farmers. One speaker was from The Stop, a food bank in Toronto and she talked about a new campaign to make policy change on poverty in Ontario. It’s been a long time that politicians have been talking about reducing poverty, but very little is happening.
The current recession makes the need more urgent, but also makes the decision to spend more to reduce poverty more financially responsible. Economists are quite clear that the best way to get more money into circulation in the economy is to give it to the poorest people you can find, because they will spend it, while those of us who are well-off are more likely to dump it into a savings account. And yet governments are still not putting the money where it is most needed, and food bank use is increasing rapidly.
