Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

offering financial products designed specifically for a down-market clientele, loans that would come with APRs between 40 and 80 percent and serious reputational baggage.

Lenders extort because they can.[31]

incorporating marginalized people into housing and financial schemes through bad deals when they are denied good ones.

but there were roughly 16 million fewer Americans in poverty in 2021 than in 2018.

the federal government

guarantees the loans and pays half their interest.

529 college savin...

federal government an estimated $28.5 billion betwe...

that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored

health insurance from taxable incomes.

Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that

put them in the top 20

percen...

I’ve met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class,

Today, the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families.

To benefit from employer-sponsored health insurance, you need a good job, usually one that requires a college degree.

when so many people had so much and yet felt so deprived and anxious?

As public housing, public education, and public transportation become poorer,

used only by the poor themselves.[6]

In America, a clear marker of poverty is one’s reliance on public services,

We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community

because we’ve neglected to invest in public transportation

projects like high-speed trains.

We avoid public parks,

but defund legal services for the indigent.

When legislators in Michigan

but also by leveraging individual fortunes to acquire access to exclusive public goods, buying yourself into an upscale community.

People used their vouchers to rent nicer apartments around the block.

“opportunity zones,” which offer tax breaks to developers and people who invest in distressed neighborhoods

But none of them did much to integrate neighborhoods or social networks along the lines of race or class.[20]

Today, we fashion our walls

money and laws.

Zoning laws govern what kinds of properti...

Atlanta changed its two residential zones

Congress passed federal legislation abolishing housing discrimination in 1968.[21]

the median central city permitted apartment dwellers to live on only 12 percent of its residential land.

Progressive cities have built the highest walls,

One study found that conservative renters were in fact more likely to support a proposal for a 120-unit apartment building in their community than liberal homeowners.[24]

civil rights era, white elites

desegregation of public parks and pools because they didn’t use those spaces anyway.

housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit.

One intervention tripled the rate

reducing the amount of text on the application, and using a more readable font.

pay only 75 percent.

We should bump up the top marginal tax rate—perhaps to 50 percent, as it was in 1986; or 70 percent, as it was in 1975—and

1,000 a month

to $57,414

universalism.”

Let’s say we want every American family to have access to the Internet.

different groups will need different interventions: