Molly > Molly's Quotes

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“Losing your home and possessions and often your job; being stamped with an eviction record and denied government housing assistance; relocating to degrading housing in poor and dangerous neighborhoods; and suffering from increased material hardship, homelessness, depression, and illness - this is eviction's fallout. Eviction does not simply drop poor families into a dark valley, a trying yet relatively brief detour on life's journey. It fundamentally redirects their way, casting them onto a different, and much more difficult, path. Eviction is a case, not just a condition, of poverty.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes?”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Housing is too fundamental a human need, too central to children’s health and development, too important to expanding economic opportunities and stabilizing communities to be treated as simply a business, a crude investment vehicle.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Exploitation within the housing market relies on government support.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing- and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, "not to destroy individualism," in Franklin D. Roosevelt's words, "but to protect it." Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money. There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. "Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Another found that achievement gaps between rich and poor children form and harden before kindergarten.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“the unprincipled act of trapping the poor in a cycle of debt has existed at least as long as the written word. It might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“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.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Income inequality has endowed rich families with more political power, which they have used to campaign for lower taxes, which in turn boosts their economic and political power even more, locking in an undemocratic and unjust cycle.[16] We need to interrupt that cycle, which is why I also support increasing the top marginal tax rate and the corporate tax rate.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“capitalism is inherently about workers trying to get as much, and owners trying to give as little, as possible. With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional mid-century work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises, and decent pay with some benefits.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“These “everybody wins” arguments ring false because they are. If ameliorating poverty and racial division would get rich kids into better colleges or bump up a company’s stock price, wouldn’t well-off Americans already be doing it? It cannot both be true that excluding poor people from high-opportunity communities enriches the lives of the people inside the wall while degrading the lives of people outside of it and that tearing down the wall and welcoming the poor into those communities will come at no cost to the current residents.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“one group’s gain need not always come at another group’s expense and that adopting such a zero-sum mindset has time and again led poor whites to choose poverty and sickness over parity with Black Americans.[”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Today, the wealth gap between Black and white families is as large as it was in the 1960s. Our legacy of systematically denying Black people access to the nation’s land and riches has been passed from generation to generation.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I figured America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we had stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes, and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I came to realize that the reality was far messier. President Reagan expanded corporate power, massively cut taxes on the rich, and rolled back spending on some antipoverty initiatives, especially in housing. But he was unable to make large-scale, long-term cuts to many of the programs that make up the American welfare state. When the president proposed reducing Social Security benefits in 1981, Congress rebuffed him.[7] Throughout Reagan’s eight years in office, antipoverty spending did not shrink. It grew and continued to grow after he left office. In fact, it grew significantly. Spending on the nation’s thirteen largest means-tested programs—aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level—went from $1,015 a person the year Ronald Reagan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trump’s administration.[8] That’s a 237 percent increase.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“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.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged. How could this be? — Part of the answer, I learned, lies in the fact that a fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. To understand why, consider welfare. When welfare was administered through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, almost all of its funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance.[12] But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars. Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“The United States now offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world, a feature that has swelled the ranks of the working poor, most of whom are thirty-five or older.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does. We risk imagining the future only as more of the same. We risk despairing, perhaps the most exculpating of all emotions, and submitting to cynicism, perhaps the most conservative of all belief systems.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Corporate profits rise when labor costs fall. This is why Wall Street is so quick to pummel companies when they bump up wages.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson sums up the pattern: “The least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Doing the right thing is often a highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly process, I know.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“Choice is the antidote for exploitation. So a crucial step toward ending poverty is giving more Americans the power to decide where to work, live, and bank, and when to start a family.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America