Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

But if arrangements that harm the poor have endured over the decades, doesn’t that suggest that they were designed to do so? At the end of the day, aren’t “systemic” problems—systemic racism, poverty, misogyny—made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest? “The system” doesn’t force us to stiff the waiter or vote against affordable housing in our neighborhood, does it?

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks.

the corporation prohibits it. Most major franchisors’ contracts contain such agreements.[29] The goal of such tactics is to restrict competition as much as possible because competition breeds choice, and choice makes exploitation difficult.

The duality of American life can make it difficult for some of us who benefit from the current arrangement to remember that the poor are exploited laborers, exploited consumers, and exploited borrowers, precisely because we are not. Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated.

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst.

The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half century, we’ve approached the poverty question by attending to the poor themselves—posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits—when we should have been focusing on the fire.

When politicians and pundits fume about long-term welfare addiction among the poor, or the social safety net functioning like “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency,” to quote former Republican congressman Paul Ryan, they are either deeply misinformed, or they are lying.[20] The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.

Our country is not divided into “makers,” who can support themselves through work, and “takers,” content to eke out a small life on government handouts. Virtually all Americans benefit from some form of public aid. Republicans and Democrats rely on government programs at equivalent rates, as do white, Hispanic, and Black families.[23] We’re all on the dole.

How do we square this? How do we reconcile the fact that massive government tax benefits go unnoticed by middle- and upper-class families who claim them, which in turn spreads resentment among those families toward a government perceived to be giving handouts to poor families, which in turn leads well-off voters to mobilize against government spending on the poor while also protecting their own tax breaks that supposedly aren’t even noticed in the first place?

students fared better in low-poverty schools or in high-poverty schools with more resources. The results were striking. Students from poor families who attended low-poverty schools significantly outperformed those who attended high-poverty schools with “state-of-the-art educational interventions.” Even when we expand the budgets of poor schools beyond those of rich ones, it does not make those schools anything close to equal.[6] I feel a little stupid making the case that

Poverty abolitionism transcends partisan divides because, frankly, poor and working-class people deserve more than either party has delivered for them over the past fifty years. Visionary organizers don’t view “those people”—liberals or conservatives, the young or the old, undocumented immigrants or citizens—as adversaries but as potential allies in the fight against poverty.

makes you wonder: Is all the rhetoric around political polarization just another kind of scarcity diversion, just another way to narrow our vision so that an emancipated future remains outside of our field of view? “The conversation is, ‘Oh, this issue is so polarizing. We’re so polarized. We think so differently,’ ” Saru told me. “And it’s just such bullshit. We are not polarized from each other. We are polarized from our electeds.” The majority of Americans believe the economy is benefitting the rich and harming the poor. The majority believe the rich aren’t paying their fair share in taxes. The majority support a $15 federal minimum wage.[7] Why, then, aren’t our elected officials representing the will of the people? This we must demand of them.

If you have found security and prosperity and wish the same for your neighbors, if you demand a dignified life for all people in America, if you love fairness and justice and want no part in exploitation for personal gain, if all the hardship in your country violates your sense of decency, this is your fight, too.

Arthur Delaney and Michael McAuliff, “Paul Ryan Wants ‘Welfare Reform Round 2,’ ” Huffington Post, March 20, 2012.