[The United States has a poverty problem.]
[[link removed]]

AMERICA IS IN A DISGRACED CLASS OF ITS OWN  
[[link removed]]


 

Matthew Desmond
March 16, 2023
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The United States has a poverty problem. _

, Photo illustration by Guillem Casasus; photograph by Javier Zayas
Photography

 

The United States has a poverty problem.

A third of the country’s people live in households making less than
$55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is
plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far
below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure
[[link removed]).-,Supplemental%20Poverty%20Measure,and%20Table%20B%2D2).],
which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one
in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021,
meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just
to reach the poverty line.

Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and
essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and
homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer
resources
[[link removed]]
to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than
other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of
its own on the world stage.

On the eve of the Covid pandemic, in 2019, our child poverty rate was
roughly double that of several peer nations
[[link removed]], including Canada,
South Korea and Germany. Anyone who has visited these countries can
plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to
live in a country without widespread public decay. When abroad, I have
on several occasions heard Europeans use the phrase “American-style
deprivation.”

Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced
as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on
top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the
nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and
your dreams. It is death come early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the
richest women in America gained
[[link removed]]
almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far
from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and
its persistence in American life should shame us.

All the more so because we clearly have the resources and know-how to
effectively end it. The bold relief issued by the federal government
during the pandemic — especially expanded child tax credits,
unemployment insurance and emergency rental assistance — plunged
child poverty
[[link removed]]
and evictions
[[link removed]] to record
lows and powered a swift [[link removed]] economic
recovery. “I don’t think we have ever seen a policy have as much
impact as quickly as the child tax credit in 2021,” Dorian Warren, a
co-president of Community Change [[link removed]], a
national organization aimed at empowering low-income people, told me.
“In six months — six months — we reduced child poverty almost by
half. We know how to do this.”

We do — but predictably, some Americans with well-fed and
well-housed families complained that the country could no longer
afford investing so deeply in its children. At best, this was a
breathtaking failure of moral imagination; at worst, it was a selfish,
harmful lie.

We could fund powerful antipoverty programs through sensible tax
reform and enforcement. A recent study
[[link removed]] estimates that collecting all
unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent — not raising
their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion —
would add $175 billion a year to the public purse. That’s enough to
more than double federal investment in affordable housing or to
re-establish the expanded child tax credit. In fact, an additional
$175 billion a year is almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty
altogether.

The hard part isn’t designing effective antipoverty policies or
figuring out how to pay for them. The hard part is ending our
addiction to poverty.

Poverty persists in America because many of us benefit from it. We
enjoy cheap goods and services and plump returns on our investments,
even as they often require a kind of human sacrifice in the form of
worker maltreatment. We defend lavish tax breaks that accrue to
wealthy Americans, starving antipoverty initiatives. And we build and
defend exclusive communities, shutting out the poor and forcing them
to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.

Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe
[[link removed]]
people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,”
not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning
with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those
obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves
by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public
policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.

To break this cycle, we must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists.

Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration,
abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill
but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated. And poverty_
_abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction
that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all.

Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term
solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more
enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat
the symptoms.

For example, to address the housing crisis forcing most poor renting
families to dedicate at least half
[[link removed]]
of their income to rent and utilities, we need to immediately expand
housing vouchers that reduce the rent burden. But we also need to push
for more transformative solutions like scaling up our public housing
infrastructure, enlarging community land banks and providing on-ramps
to homeownership
[[link removed]]
for low-income families.

When it comes to work, we should attack labor exploitation head-on by
finding ways to even the playing field between workers and bosses —
supporting collective bargaining, for instance, and requiring that
worker representatives be given seats on corporate boards
[[link removed]]. At the
bare minimum, Congress should increase the federal minimum wage —
which hasn’t been raised since July 2009 — and, like dozens of
other countries
[[link removed]],
allow the federal government to routinely adjust the wage without
legislative approval, ensuring that workers wouldn’t have to wait
around another 13-plus years (and counting!) for a pay bump.

If we apply the legal scholar John A. Powell’s “targeted
universalism [[link removed]]”
approach to eradicating poverty — an approach that involves setting
a goal and recognizing that certain groups will need distinctive
interventions for that goal to be met — then our attitude toward
different antipoverty policies should be “both and.” We don’t
need new solutions to this problem as much as a new mind-set, a
renewed national commitment to broad prosperity.

The ideal poverty rate in America is zero. Why settle for anything
less? Why accept the boring, pernicious best-we-can-doism that has
captured the inequality debate in recent years? “We have to
challenge the tragedy, the catastrophe, of compromise,” the Rev.
William Barber II, one of the chairmen of the Poor People’s Campaign
[[link removed]], told me.

When the Johnson administration launched “an unconditional war on
poverty in America” in 1964, it wasn’t just lofty rhetoric. It set
a deadline. Sargent Shriver, the director of the Office of Economic
Opportunity, announced that “the target date for ending poverty in
this land” would be 1976, the bicentennial. “We once had ambitions
about poverty abolitionism,” Dorian Warren reminded me, and we can
rekindle that sense of urgency.

So rather than wait around for Congress to act, we should begin to act
ourselves. Poverty abolitionism isn’t just a political project,
after all; it’s a personal one, too. For starters, just as many of
us are now shopping and investing in ways that address climate change,
we can also do so with an eye toward economic justice. If we can, we
should reward companies that treat their employees well and shun those
with a track record of union busting and exploitation. To do so, we
can consult organizations like B Lab
[[link removed]], which certifies companies that
meet high social and environmental standards, and Union Plus
[[link removed]], which curates lists of
union-made products.

These everyday decisions can add up to something. If more of us
adopted poverty abolitionism as a way of living — and of seeing the
world and imagining a better one — that behavior would spread
[[link removed]],
which in turn could redefine what is socially acceptable and what is
believed possible. If enough of us found ways to show that we will no
longer stand for so much immiseration, we would put upward pressure on
corporate and elected leaders, potentially creating a groundswell of
political will and renewed calls for reform.

We need to “create a new common sense,” Jenn Stowe, the executive
director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me. Working
on behalf of nannies, house cleaners and home care workers, the
alliance is seeking to reframe our expectations around care — that
it is a right, not a commodity, for instance — by “creating a
pathway for people to see themselves in this movement,” as Ms. Stowe
put it. “It’s going to take all of us.”

We can also disrupt all the quotidian ways we normalize the status
quo. It is commonplace for privileged Americans to gripe about taxes.
But doing so ignores how the country’s welfare state does much more
to subsidize affluence — with tax breaks for college savings
accounts, wealth transfers and more — than to alleviate poverty.

What if, the next time a co-worker brought up the topic, we talked
about that instead? What if we gawked at the fact that homeowners
pocket billions of dollars each year because of the mortgage interest
deduction, an absurd cutout that flows primarily to well-off Americans
[[link removed]],
while most poor renting families receive no government housing
assistance? What if some of those homeowners began donating a portion
or even all of their mortgage deduction windfalls to eviction defense
and began lobbying Congress to wind down the benefit and redirect the
money to antipoverty initiatives?

That this straightforward, milquetoast proposal will strike some of us
as audacious, even radical, shows just how constricted our moral
ambitions have become and how much we’ve backslid as a nation
committed to freedom and equal opportunity.

And we cannot in good faith claim a commitment to poverty abolitionism
— or antiracism — if we continue to embrace segregation in our
neighborhoods and schools. Our values should not end where our
property line begins. Poverty abolitionists oppose exclusionary zoning
laws and work to create inclusive neighborhoods. This means doing the
hard work of tearing down the walls so many of us have built around
our communities, lobbying neighbors, sharing evidence that shows that
smartly designed affordable housing doesn’t affect property values
[[link removed]] and showing
up at zoning board meetings (where affordable housing proposals go to
die) and voicing support for new developments.

In the 1960s, Dixiecrats aligned with Republicans to gum up the
legislative process. Senators slept in their offices so they could
filibuster liberal reforms. Governmental inertia was not only the
outcome but also the goal. (Sound familiar?) And yet, in the face of
all that political polarization and obstructionism, major pieces of
civil and voting rights legislation were signed into law and the
modern social safety net was created with the passage of the Great
Society and War on Poverty.

These transformative initiatives lifted millions out of poverty,
outlawed discrimination and protected Black Americans’ citizenship
rights. If so much was accomplished despite the odds, it was because
grass-roots organizers, and the civil rights and labor movements in
particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers.

Today, as then, the best hope we have of ending poverty is to bind
ourselves together and demand this of our country. A mass movement for
economic justice is necessary. One led by those who have had enough is
stirring. We can join them, no matter our lot in life.

This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find
the will to do so — the will not to reduce poverty but to end it.

===

Matthew Desmond
[[link removed]]
(@just_shelter [[link removed]]) is a
sociologist at Princeton, where he is the director of the Eviction
Lab; a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine; and the
author of “Poverty, by America
[[link removed]]”
and “Evicted
[[link removed]]:
Poverty and Profit in the American City.”

* U.S. Poverty; Poverty Abolitionism; Tax policy;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]