Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies.

Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.

Our biggest antipoverty program for the working poor is the Earned Income Tax Credit. In 2021, 25 million workers and families received this subsidy, the average payment being $2,411.[36] The EITC is one of the nation’s most enduring antipoverty programs, in large part because of its strong bipartisan backing. But perhaps the primary reason the EITC enjoys such widespread support is because it functions as a generous handout to corporations. Among the loudest champions of the EITC have been multinational businesses, whose low wages are effectively subsidized through the program.

Every year: over $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check cashing fees, and up to $9.8 billion in payday loan fees. That’s over $61 million in fees collected predominately from low-income Americans each day—not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-to-own schemes.

call it the propaganda of capitalism—a story that has been handed down from one generation to the next: that our medicine (aid to the poor) is poison. The message has been received. Half the country appears to believe that social benefits from the government make people lazy.[9]