The IRS should waive the 10% early withdrawal penalty on the use of Traditional and Roth IRA funds for cases of chronic unemployment and under-employment until the economy reaches a recovery level (suggested here at 6% unemployment for 12 month rolling period) where saving for retirement can continue again.  Ideally, this waiver should have started in 2008 or 2009 to be fair to all US citizens impacted by the financial crisis, but it should at least start with the 2011 tax filing.

US unemployment and under-employment is estimated at 15-16% of the workforce or approximately 23 million US citizens based on current Census and Bureau of Labor statistics.  Since those filing for unemployment benefits is currently estimated at 3% this leaves roughly 13% or nearly 19 million individuals who while trying to meet their current expenses are going into debt, selling all possessions, finding other unconventional resources, retirement resources or with all that failing becoming homeless and falling to reliance on charity.  If any of these 19 million individuals are using their retirement funds to meet expenses and are under the age of 59 1/2, they are required by the IRS to pay a penalty of 10% on early withdrawal.  This penalty is an unnecessary artifact of a time when the government believed these funds could accumulate tax-free for future use and represented a possible tax loophole.  Under current conditions, when the government is looking for easy ways to assist US citizens under financial stress, this is one simple fix to the tax code to assist.  It is important to note that due to the financial markets sustaining multiple episodes of stock market and securities losses since 2000, many of these IRA accounts have been and are experiencing losses.  Some have lost as much as 100% of their accounts.  With the current volatility in the market, it is not certain that funds will be available for future retirement purposes.  Withdrawing funds that remain in these accounts from the financial markets could be a better use than gambling on the current market instability.

for more discussion and explanation see THIS and please consider signing the petition HERE

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Animal Agriculture and World Hunger by Gary Yourofsky

 

Meat-eating societies are the main cause of world hunger because they feed a disproportionate percentage of the world’s crops to the more than 50 billion land animals raised for food annually, and tens of billions of marine animals (yes, we have fish farms nowadays)—instead of 6.5 billion people on the planet! Do the math. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out this equation. Every 2-3 seconds some human (most likely a child) starves to death, while pigs and cows continually get fat. Even the Council for Agriculture Science and Technology, a group comprised of people involved in animal agriculture, acknowledges that 10 billion people could be fed with the available crop land in America if everyone became vegan. One acre of land can yield 30,000 pounds of carrots, 40,000 pounds of potatoes or 50,000 pounds of tomatoes. However, one acre of land can yield only 250 pounds of meat. Why? Depending on the animal in question, it takes from three to twenty pounds of vegetable protein to create one pound of animal protein. Thus it has been said in many places that animal agriculture works like “a protein factory in reverse.” However, not only does this process squander protein resources; it obliterates carbohydrates and fiber, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and many other nutrients altogether.

Jeremy Rifkin, a widely respected author on issues of worldwide food supply, traces the occurrences of famine directly to our increasing tendency to use precious food resources as animal feed. In his editorial piece There’s a Bone to Pick with Meat Eaters, published in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002, Rifkin states that 36 percent of all the world’s grains are fed to food animals; in the U.S. the number is a staggering 70 percent. (Keep in mind that the worldwide number is now eight years old as of this writing; the current number for worldwide grains being fed to animals is now 65 percent!) In emerging nations such as China, Egypt, Mexico and Thailand, the portion of arable land used to grow animal feed has increased since 1950 between threefold and thirtyfold, depending on the country. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; an acre of legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce 10 times more protein; leafy vegetables, 15 times more protein. (Please click the link above to read the entire article.)

In his groundbreaking book The Food Revolution, John Robbins observes that producing surplus amounts of grain in the U.S. frequently results in obscenely unjust exchanges of food resources that take place between the U.S. and many Latin American countries, for example. If soybeans, vegetables and grains were fed directly to humans, instead of to animals whose lives were forced into existence in any event, we could alleviate much world hunger by putting an end to these unjust transactions. (Read the relevant excerpt from Robbins’ book here.)

It’s no accident that many of the same factors that make animal-based agriculture an environmental disaster also make it disastrous when it comes to feeding the world’s human populations. As the previous section has noted, sustaining a carnivorous culture requires twenty times more land, fourteen times more water, and from ten to twenty times more consumption of fossil fuels and other energy sources, than would be required to sustain a purely vegan culture of the same size. (It’s also worth noting that the American people—the most wasteful culture on the planet—comprise less than five percent of the world’s population, yet they consume 20 percent of the world’s animals raised for food.) Animal agriculture is not only evil to the animals that it imprisons, enslaves, tortures, and kills; it is monumentally evil when we consider the harm it wreaks on the natural environment and the health of individual persons, its devastating impact on health-care systems all over the world, and finally, its exacerbating effects on world famine and hunger. GO VEGAN! It’s simply the right thing to do.

Help devise a system for using food stamps to buy better produce.

We all can agree that fresh fruits and vegetables are an essential part of good health. Yet access to fresh produce remains an enormous challenge. For people on food stamps, it’s an especially difficult one as there are few supermarkets in low income neighborhoods with sufficient offerings. Even thought more farmers’ markets are springing up across the country—and more than 750 farmers’ markets nationwide accept food stamps—other challenges remain.

Foodstamps, of course, are no longer physical stamps but “electronic benefit transfer” cards (or EBTs). This has helped remove the stigma for recipients of aid—and makes shopping at supermarkets easier—but has left farmers’ markets in a tough spot: without a battery-powered wireless card reader, food-stamp recipients can’t use their EBT cards. The lack of this simple machine is keeping people from buying fresh food. Many farmers are unable to afford the cost of the equipment (about $1,100 per reader) required to accept the debit cards; others feel the paperwork and record keeping is onerous.

Some (but not all) states have agreed to fund programs to facilitate the use of food stamps at farmers’ markets. Vendors can use hand-held devices, and in some cases cell phones, to process transactions. Other markets, like San Francisco’s Alemany Market, allow EBT card users to exchange their credit for market-specific tokens that can be used at individual booths, but the extra step required has resulted in a drop off in use of food stamps at farmers’ markets.

All of which begs the question: how can we make food stamps easier to use and to accept at farmers’ markets?

the OBJECTIVE
Make it easy to use and accept food stamps at farmers’ markets.

the ASSIGNMENT
Invent a low cost, easy to implement solution. Is it an app? Centralized check-out? Delivery? Something totally low tech? Barter? Trade? Let us know.

the REQUIREMENTS
Post a comment, tweet @GOOD, or e-mail projects[at]goodinc[dot]com with your solution to the problem of how to accept food stamps at farmers’ markets. Your response can take the form of a sentence, a paragraph, a sketch, an annotated photo—whatever you think will best convey your idea. Deadline is Monday, March 29. UPDATE: You can also submit ideas via our project page on ChallengePost.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/project-foodstamps-and-farmers-markets/#ixzz0iHtU2c4R

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(photo @ Nettles Nasser)