I was watching the CBS Evening News, co-hosted by John Dickerson and Maurice Dubois on April 17, about a food-insecure family in bucolic Wallingford, Connecticut, which is fourteen miles north of New Haven. The brief broadcast (3:33) stated that the family was desperately dependent upon a local food bank despite making a combined salary of six figures [my emphasis].
I thought to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
As I initially listened to Mark Strassmann narrate the broadcast, my immediate reaction was somewhere between surreality and disbelief. I again incredibly asked myself, “How could a family making six figures be so dependent upon a food bank?”
As I watched the broadcast, I thought that this was the type of superficial and pernicious propaganda that I would expect from state-run media in either an autocratic or Communist country. I immediately thought of both RT (Russia Today) and CCTV (China Central Television), which routinely decries the deplorable “evils” and the impending collapse of the American economy under President Trump along with his predecessors.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income (in 2023 dollars) in Wallingford, Connecticut, was $101,572, which CBS conveniently failed to mention. I can only conclude that there must be unbelievably a lot of “impoverished” wealthy people in Wallingford, which is an absolute oxymoron.
CBS failed to remind its viewers that during the Biden administration, food inflation increased to a minimum of 20% as of August 2024, according to the New York Times. However, I suspect that the percentage was manipulated and much higher. This was in direct contrast to a much smaller increase of 8% during the first Trump administration, according to the Consumer Price Index.
However, during the Biden administration, according to CBS News onSeptember 18, 2024, overall inflation cost the “typical American household $28,000.” That resulted in a huge hidden “tax” on both the working poor and middle class from 2021 to 2025.
My own personal grocery cost during the Biden administration at both Walmart and Kroger increased from approximately $200 to $270, which was a huge 35% increase while essentially buying the same food required by a strict cardiac diet. One major reason that food increased under Biden so much was that he recklessly printed “$11.6 trillion” throughout the last three years and six months of his administration, according to the non-profit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Therefore, all this printing of dollars caused significant inflation in the U.S. economy, especially increasing the cost of food. So, the Trump blame game is not going to work.
The web edition (transcript) of the broadcast, which included the video of the same CBS Evening News broadcast, was written by Mark Strassmann and Samantha M. Wender. It was entitled, “Food insecurity driven by inflation has people with higher incomes turning to food banks.”
CBS stated in the first paragraph, “Inflation has more people turning to food banks for help, including people with six-figure incomes [my emphasis] struggling to feed their families.”
Strassmann interviewed “Chandra Kelsey … a mother of three who works full-time as a program director at the Yale School of Public Health, and [who] sometimes takes on a second job to make ends meet.” She stated that she and her husband “take home a total of $150,000, but it’s often not enough.”
Her remarks made me cry a river of tears. I always thought that food banks were for people who had incomes less than $20,000 per year, but apparently that is not true in affluent Connecticut.
She whined and complained, “That’s not what you bring home after taxes. You know we have mortgage insurance. We’ve got one kid on the way to college, one in college. Something as small as a $100 expense. Could throw things off significantly.” Woe is me.
Perhaps CBS should have asked her if she and her husband needed to move into a less expensive house with less square footage? Perhaps her son or daughter should consider enrolling in a less expensive college or take out student loans? Perhaps two of her children should start working part-time jobs during both the academic year and summers?
Never once did CBS question if she had credit card debt or what was the interest rate. Never once did CBS ask how many vacations did her family take every year and where. Never once did CBS question her about her family’s spending habits.
It strongly appears that this woman and her family desperately and immediately need a consumer finance counselor. I would strongly bet that she and her husband have very little money in a savings account because of frivolous spending and a lack of Yankee frugality.
Mrs Kelsey unbelievably stated that she ” has relied on Connecticut Foodshare, the state’s largest food bank, on and off for over a decade [my emphasis],” with her two children showing their appreciation by ” volunteering there.”
CBS stated, “In Connecticut, one in eight people are food insecure, according to Connecticut Foodshare.” Its CEO Jason Jakubowski stated, “Demand for their food jumped 23% last year. He expects another double-digit increase this year. Recently, he’s seen more demand from people with higher incomes who need help.”
I strongly suspect that CBS has a definite bias in blaming Trump for not questioning Jakubowski’s future economic prediction, although the president has been in office for only one hundred days since April 22.
CBS greatly implied that food insecurity was bad in 2024 under Biden but might be doubly bad under Trump in 2025. Never once did the CEO of Connecticut Foodshare ever define the phrase “higher incomes.” The CEO vaguely blamed food insecurity on “a lot of economic unpredictability,” most likely caused by Trump.
Mrs. Kelsey stated that she was extremely “scared about her job in the wake of uncertainty ever continued government funding of universities,” which especially includes her employer, Yale in New Haven. What she conveniently forgets to mention is that Yale’s endowment “totaled $40.7 billion on June 30, 2023,” which is the third highest in the U.S.
I could quote the remainder of the article ad nauseam, but I have zero pity on a family of five with an income of $150,000 per year dependent on a Connecticut food bank when there are so many Americans, who have just one seventh of the annual income of Chandra Kelsey’s family, and are truly dependent upon food banks.
The CBS Evening News, which is a total bleeding heart, should be ashamed of broadcasting such anti-Trump and anti-DOGE biased and shallow journalism, which only made me cry a river of tears.
Robert L. Maronic