Last week I had the pleasure to watch this interview with Matthew Desmond who presents his book "Poverty, in America".
The interview was really refreshing and it taught me new ways to look at what is happening around us. The most shocking part was when he explained how the government is essentially 'subsidizing the affluent' instead of helping the poor.
Desmond makes a very convincing argument that shows how the burden of the taxes in this country is on the poor, instead of the middle class.
Here are my cliff notes. You can find links to reviews and articles on the book at the bottom of the page.
-A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that poverty is the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States.
-Roughly 500 people die from poverty in the U.S. every day. Our guest, sociologist Matthew Desmond, is the author of the new book, Poverty, by America_, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book 'Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City'.
-"There's so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it,"
General concepts
-It's because of its wealth that there are so many poor (book's subject)
-38 million Americans below the poverty line
-1 in 3 bring in salaries like 55000$ or less
-Unnecessary scarcity and abundance in this country
-The book "Poverty, by America" is on how we can abolish this (unjust) system
-Why are we so messed up while other countries don't have anywhere near this level of poverty?
-Our child poverty rate double that of South Korea or Germany
-Many of us who found privilege and prosperity in our lives contribute to this:
-We consume the goods the poor provides
-When labor costs are pushed down and we make money in the market, we use the system against the poor (again)
-Many of us get tax breaks which is an enormous part of government spending and those starve other programs that can help the poor.
-We continue to be segregationists
The myth of the welfare state
-[4:54] On the conservative's idea of a welfare state.
-In reality, our country is subsidizing the affluent
-Every year we spend 1.8 trillion dollars in tax breaks (double of the military) for affluent people.
The tax breaks are the same thing as food stamps or housing assistance:
- they cost the government money
- they put money in the house of people
- they increase the deficit
If you add up all the tax breaks that are going to families and all the means tested programs, the poorest families, and all the social insurance programs basically everything that government does for its people you learn that:
- every year families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receive about twenty-five thousand dollars a year from the government
- but every year families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution our richest families receive about thirty-six thousand dollars from the government that's almost a forty percent difference.
Money that is never spent (sometimes by choice)
AG: Why in fact already in this country there are millions of dollars available to people who are in the lowest economic bracket that they can't or don't take advantage of? Explain what are the obstacles in the way
MD: one obstacle is we do a very bad job connecting families to programs that they need and deserve.
- Sometimes we literally just don't spend the money on fighting poverty so if you look at a program like the temporary assistance and needy families program or TANF this is Cash welfare for every dollar budgeted for TANF only 22 cents ends up in the family's pocket
- What's going on here well states have a lot of discretion about how to spend the money and they spend it in really creative ways some states use those dollars to fund Christian summer camps or abstinence-only education marriage initiatives things that have nothing to do with alleviating poverty
- Many states don't even spend the money last time I checked Tennessee was sitting on over 700 million dollars on unspent welfare dollars and so this is one way that that money doesn't reach the families that need it the most and another way is that many families are just leaving a lot of money on the table
The enemies of the poor
AG: your comment that many well-off Americans quote are unwinning (unwilling?) enemies of the poor and this goes to the issue of solutions explain how so:
-MD: if we just look at tax breaks for example so many of us who are homeowners receive something called the mortgage interest deduction.
-We can just deduct the interest of our mortgage every year at tax time and if you look at that deduction and you look at everything that homeowner subsidies amount to you know in 2021 we as a nation spend:
- 193 billion dollars on those benefits
- and only 53 billion dollars on Direct housing assistance to the needy public housing Section 8
-so it's a big imbalance most of those property owner deductions went to families with six-figure incomes
-you also have to face the fact that most white Americans uh today are homeowners and they benefit from one of the sweetest cutouts in the tax code
-but most black and latinx families are not because of our systematic dispossession of people of color from the land and so it's a really it's really hard to think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying racial and economic inequalities than that system does
Conclusion
-Many of us are protective of those tax breaks and so this book is a call to reevaluate our values
-it's not a call for redistribution I don't think it is a call for rebalancing our safety net
-I want a country that does a lot more to fight poverty than it does to guard fortunes.
Additional links
Samuel Moyn
By
