This thread started out submitting that the economy is improving, and that the Left is being dragged kicking and screaming to this conclusion. I have seen amazing feats of spin to try and put a negative cast on it.

While your response is more reasonable than many, it has the same purpose, and your anecdotes, while touching, don't stand up very well.

If you're four years old and you've never had a piece of fresh fruit in all your life, what do you think your chances of recognizing a balanced diet would be?

If you're four years old, and never had fresh fruit, there are more serious problems in that family than simple lack of money.

You don't grow fruit and vegetables in the city. You go down to the store and buy fruit and vegetables. I can get four pounds of oranges for the price of a pack of cigarettes. Online. From my shopping experience, raw food is the cheapest you can get, and I'm amazed by how many people are trying to sell me the idea that the poor buy high-fat prepared foods because they can't afford the raw ones.

If you're two years old and you've grown up (so far) in a home where people live on canned goods because they're cheap and they keep, how much of that infant-specialized enriched stuff do you think you got as a baby? If the choice was between diapers and baby vitamins, what do you think won?

Canned goods can be as healthy as any others, and raw food is cheaper. My inlaws never bought baby food, but ran regular food through a grinder. The poor can get prenatal and infant vitamins for free around here if they know where to look.

If you're seven years old and you live in a home where sometimes there's food and sometimes there isn't, how well do you think you can concentrate on your reading lessons on days when you came to school on four glasses of water and two pieces of bread?

Almost every school in this state offers free meals to the poor, including breakfast. Childcare centers and other institutions are also eligible to participate. Why isn't this kid getting some?

We could go on like this all day.

The problems with the chronic poor in the modern age of welfare are not jobs or the economy, but ignorance, passivity, and a government that has something to gain by keeping them that way. If there is a real issue, it's educating the poor to make better choices with their resources, better choices on nutrition, and to take advantage of the many benefits that are available.

Nor can one entirely disregard the incentive on the part of vast government bureaucracies, intended to serve the poor, to inflate the poverty problem to maintain and increase their own size and funding.

That being said, the economy is still improving, the poor will gain by it, and getting them out of poverty is turning out to be more effective than simply maintaining them there.