From a Google Image Search – Penguin Random House

Matt Desmond has, once again, given us a textbook on poverty, just as he gave us a textbook on evictions, in his newest book Poverty by America. He offers factual evidence to prove his point that an affluent society such as our does not have to allow such poverty to exist, that poverty in America is made in America and serves no purpose except to create a permanent underclass. Then he offers many ways to end poverty if we will only implement such solutions. We live in a society that increasingly turns a deaf ear to inequality and even makes policies to make sure that poor people, especially poor black people, stay poor. We build walls between “us” and “them” and then turn down policies that might “tear down those walls.”

What Desmond said.

In his Prologue/ Matt Desmond asks, “Why are so many Americans poor? Why is there so much hardship in this land of abundance.” He talks about his childhood in Winslow, Arizona, and his pastor father. His father lost their house to foreclosure, and they survived but life was difficult. Eventually Desmond attended Arizona State University where he often hung out with homeless people. What he saw around him was so much money. In Tempe, he remembers, they built a fake lake two blocks away from a homeless area. Desmond describes his work in Milwaukee and tells us that he has met poor people around the entire country. We are, he says, “the richest country on earth with more poor people than any other democracy.” “More than one million of our school children are homeless.” “More than 2 million families don’t have running water or flushing toilets.” “America’s poverty is not about lack of resources.” “The most fundamental question is why some lives are made small so that others may grow.” To resolve this poverty problem requires that we become “poverty abolitionists.”

Chapter. 1 The Kind of Problem America’s Problem Is /A person is considered poor when s/he can’t afford food, shelter, and basic needs.  Molly Orshansky set poverty thresholds such as one in 2002-$27,750 for a family of four. Desmond tells the story of Crystal Mayberry born prematurely when her mother was stabbed. Both survived. Her mother smoked crack cocaine. She left Crystal’s father and moved in with another man who molested her. Crystal ended up in foster care. She argued with other girls in group homes. Crystal put on weight. She stopped going to high school. At 18 she aged out of foster care – went through 25 different foster care situations. When her mental problems were diagnosed, she qualified for SSI. She found an apartment which took 70% of her income. She got evicted. She lived in shelters. She walked on the streets in the day or rode busses or the subway. Then they took away her SSI and left her with only food stamps. She turned to prostitution.

Poverty is an endless piling on of pain. Desmond talks of toxins in work and home environments. He speaks about no dental care. He reminds us that the poorest Americans don’t qualify for Obamacare. Their lives are marked by violence.

Chapter. 2 Why haven’t we made more progress/ We cured smallpox, invented the internet and cell phones. Graphing poverty shows a gently rising and falling line. How do we account for poverty? After all poor people have access to cheap sweets and cheap entertainment from TV and movies. However, Desmond says, access to appliances does not prove that there is no longer poverty – costs of health care and rent have increased. Utilities increased 115% in price. Michael Harrington said in his book The Other America, “It’s much easier in America to be decently dressed than to be decently housed or afford decent health care.” Reagan cut back on housing but was unable to shrink antipoverty spending. The spending grew precipitately. The greatest increase was on healthcare. The US has not become stingier over time which makes it even more confusing. Examination shows that much of aid never reaches the poor because it is given in the form of block grants which often get diverted to other expenses. Desmond gives examples of how some of these funds have been diverted. He looks in detail at TANF dollars. It’s eye opening.

Chapter 3 How we undercut workers/ We blame the poor for their own poverty. It’s popular these days to trace poverty back to big changes like deindustrialization and other social causes. If arrangements that infect the poor have existed for decades, doesn’t it suggest that it was intended to be this way. People benefit from poverty in all kinds of ways. “Who gets eaten and who gets to eat”, Steven Sondheim said as a comment on the Darwinian aspects of wealth and poverty. Think about how landlords make a living by renting inferior properties to the poorest Americans. Complexity is the refuge of the wealthy. They claim that the matter is complicated. “One man’s poverty is another man’s opportunity.” “Do employers have to pay so little. Would paying more lead to higher unemployment?” Stigler said that if employers had to pay people more per hour unemployment would rise and he made this statement without collecting any facts. Subsequent data showed that raising the minimum wage has negligible effects on employment levels. Stigler was wrong. Between 1940’s to 1970’s progress on wage raises happened and America experienced one of the most equitable periods in its history. Unions are credited with this effect. Black workers were excluded. Women were not a force in the job market. Labor was blamed for our subsequent economic slump. Desmond talks about the firing of all the air traffic controllers which taught corporations to ignore unions. Corporate interests insured unions remained weak. An arsenal of tactics has been developed to prevent unionizing.

Chapter 4 How we force the poor to pay more/ There are many ways to be exploited such as underpaying workers (labor exploitation), raising prices and interest rates (consumer exploitation) and more. Rentals exploded in price and apartments got partitioned into smaller units – apartments in poor areas can cost more than those in more affluent areas – ghetto boundaries were written into law. Ghetto landlords had a captive rental base so they could take advantage and they did, especially absentee landlords. Money made slums because slums made money. Rising rents is not just about lack of housing. Poor people and particularly poor black families don’t have much choice about where they can live. Desmond quotes a study estimating landlord’s profits. Landlords in poor areas make twice the profit of landlords in affluent neighborhoods. Some landlords will rent housing and let it get rundown and then just move on to another city.

Chapter 5 How We Rely on Welfare/ In this chapter Desmond talks about shutdowns during COVID = March 16, 2020, millions of people needed unemployment so the government stepped in and expanded unemployment benefits and other benefits – poverty did not increase during our economic shutdown; in fact, these payments cut child poverty by half. A percentage of Americans blamed our slow recovery on stipends which assuaged poverty. Kevin McCarthy said that Americans weren’t getting back to work because they were receiving too many benefits. States that cut benefits were experiencing a loss of consumer spending. We did not look for other reasons why people didn’t return to work. Capitalists decry any attempt to aid the poor. They protect one kind of dependency, dependency on work and speak out against supposed dependency on aid. End welfare as we know it was the advice of conservatives. The propaganda of welfare says that if you help people by making sure they have enough money to live on through welfare, they will not work. Another study showed there was not much long-term dependency on welfare. Welfare is insurance against temporary misfortune. Welfare avoidance is a far bigger problem. Why do needy people say no to billions in federal aid each year? We are all on the dole. He gives facts and figures. Far more aid goes to affluent families than to the poor, but it is often invisible. We accept the current state of affairs because we like it.

Chapter 6 How We Buy Opportunity/ The early aughts have been called the Second Gilded Age. Many of us are colossally rich. We are much richer than other countries, even other rich countries. Yet people feel so deprived and anxious. Our perspective prevents us from seeing what is going on. Working class people bear the costs of our amusements. Rich folks complain that Russian oligarchs are gobbling up the east side of NYC. How many Russian oligarchs are there? We don’t even call our own oligarchs, oligarchs.

What happens to a country when people with such different resources live alongside each other. This same problem was reported in ancient Rome. Galbraith said in The Affluent Society that personal fortunes grow while public services decay. Money brings independence from the public sector. “We used to wish to be free of work, now we want to be free of bus drivers,” Desmond quips. We see violent juxtapositions of degradation and affluence or, using different words, private opulence and public squalor. We spend more on private consumption and less on public investments. Desmond brings up the tax cuts and says a major driver was the tax cuts of 1981 resulting in growth of the deficit. In 1982 Reagan raised taxes a bit. Tax cuts are the main engines of public squalor and private opulence. Proposition 13 in California led to a revolt, an angry response to white people being forced to share public spaces with black people. White people withdrew from public spaces. Taxes came to be considered compulsory donations to black people so then white people came together to protest taxes. City public schools lost almost all their white students. “More for me, less for we,” says Desmond. Forced busing didn’t work. Housing vouchers did not move the poor out of their neighborhoods. Then we thought perhaps we could provide opportunities to these communities. Each program had effects, but no program has changed stubborn poverty areas. Local zoning ordinances tell you all you need to do about cities. Residential 1 (R1) districts do not allow multifamily housing or apartment projects. People want more public housing, but they don’t want it in their neighborhood. One group’s gain does not have to come at another group’s expense. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

Ch. 7 Invest in Ending Poverty/ In this chapter Desmond talks of Tolstoy who moved to Moscow in the late 19th century and who was shocked to see the grueling poverty coexisting with opulence. He concluded that poverty resulted from those who hoarded wealth. Even in America someone bears the costs of opulence. We could help solve this in part by collecting taxes that the wealthy should but don’t pay. The rich ask, “but how can we afford it?” We could afford it if we paid taxes. Affluence breeds affluence, poverty breeds poverty. There is a wall between the wealthy and the poor. Starvation and dignity do not mix well. We could make sure people get the welfare they qualify for. People don’t take advantage of aid because we have made it hard and confusing. Even using a better font makes a difference. 

How much would it cost to end poverty? 177 billion dollars is a good start (number of people below the poverty line x amount to bring them above the poverty line.  There are many advantages. Start with the IRS cheaters. IRS estimates that they owe 1 trillion dollars. Companies are doing everything to avoid paying what they owe. Tax shelters and offshore accounts for example. Bump up the top tax rate. Tax an investment banker differently than a dentist. Put it at 35%, or 46% as it once was. Evidence does not back a drag on the economy from raising taxes on top earners. Desmond tells us where we could get the money to end poverty. Expand the Earned Income Credit. Invest in new and public housing. Invest in public transportation. Make UBI less polarizing, make the nation more politically stable. Back bigger tent programs that cover a broader spectrum of low earners -“targeted universalism.” Different groups require different kinds of aid. Fundamental message – make policies that kindle cooperation rather than resentment. Redistribution is not a helpful way to look at this. Why are we so focused on helping the wealthy? Rich people – pay your taxes. We need more poor aid and less rich aid. Emergency Rental Assistance during COVID cut evictions in half across the US. It was amazingly effective. But when it worked it got little attention. The program became a temporary program, and now we are back to seven evictions every minute. When we refuse to acknowledge what works we risk the message that these things don’t work. We don’t just need more anti-poverty investments; we need different ones.

Ch. 8 Empower the Poor/ Choice is the antidote to exploitation. Offer the poor more choices about where to work, where to live, and where to shop. Raise the minimum wage. Sponsor humane and periodic reviews of the minimum wage. Congress should outlaw degrading wages. We should promote worker empowerment. A new economy calls for new labor laws. New labor must be inclusive. Make organizing easy. Right now, workers must organize one Amazon warehouse or Starbucks at a time. We must go about this in more collaborative way – Sectoral Bargaining. Come up with a Clean Slate for Worker’s Power. Use the results of the 2020 convention or meeting to make suggestions for new ways to organize. Subsidized housing has advantages for the children who live in such settings. Banks have shown little interest in funding subsidized housing. Government could provide on-ramps to home ownership. Image a post-poverty world by looking to people who are already working on this – (“Commoning”). Tenants buy apartment buildings from landlords – coops. Examples are IX organization and the landbank in the Twin Cities. Devise ways to fight exploitation in the housing market. Adopt a singular goal to end exploitation of the poor in work, housing, and banking. Expand low-income people’s access to credit beyond predatory lenders like pay day lenders. Reproductive choice – women’s empowerment was tied to their reproductive empowerment-freedom to pursue a career or a college education. There is a history of enforced sterility or contraception among black women which works against this dynamic. Desmond cites the Turn Away Study from Southern California. Those forced to give birth were found to be in lower income groups four years later. The children suffered too. A nation as wealthy as ours could use our funds to make sure that women and children have the supports they need. Poverty in America is something we all contribute to. Become a poverty abolitionist. It’s easier to change norms than beliefs. Advertise private acts of poverty abolitionism.

Ch. 9 Tear Down the Walls/ “Our walls, they have to go!” Still, we act as modern-day segregationists by living in separated neighborhoods. Even policies like UBI (Universal Basic Income) don’t affect segregation. Segregation poisons our minds and souls. It brings out the worst of us making us fear each other. Integration means we all have skin in the game. It interrupts poverty on a spiritual level and eventually may do the same for integration. We need to be advocating more housing options. Author says he has never heard of an empty low-rent apartment project that was located in a nice neighborhood. 

Rucker Johnson studied kids who experienced an integrated education vs kids who did not. Black students experienced positive outcomes while white students did not experience negative outcomes. Even when we expand the budgets of low-income schools the advantages are not as great for students as in integrated schools. Corruption of opportunity can end with us. 

Replacing exclusionary zoning laws allows us to build kinds of housing low-income people need. Passing inclusionary zoning makes mixed development likely (and offers a density bonus). New Jersey leads the way on this in the US. When affordable housing is built to blend into the surrounding community and is well-maintained it does not have to affect property values. 

Those who wish to stay behind their walls should get no help for this. George Romney came up with these ideas about inclusion and lost an election. White homeowners would not have it. They elected Richard Nixon. Pro-segregationists have worked hard in local politics to keep the walls. They are often the only voices. 

Society improves only when citizens do the difficult things. Charity is already important but it’s not enough. Funding scarcity is something we have legislated. It’s not real. It will cost us to fight poverty but it’s easier to stomach raising property taxes on the rich than stomach increasing homelessness and stubborn poverty – (fabricated scarcity). What we have now is white worker against black, Native worker against immigrant. Blame anyone you can except those who are really responsible. We are a land of bounty. No one in America needs to be poor. Why do we continue to accept scarcity when there is no need? Lift the floor. Rebalance our social safety net. Turn away from segregation. Change is painful. There are costs to better economic balance. There will be tensions and arguments. We could give up the shame of perpetuating poverty. Ending poverty would not end income inequality. However, it would bring a net gain in our feelings of positivity.

These are things that Matt Desmond said in Poverty by America, but since I was listening to the book on Audible and since it was difficult to keep up while taking notes at speed, direct quotes may be mixed with paraphrasing. The problem with a spoken book is that you don’t have access to the text to double check what you put in your notes. Still, I believe I got this essentially right. The doctor has given us a prescription to cure the disease. Will we heed it and take the cure? The outlook is not good, but things do change. Thank you, Matt Desmond for speaking truth to power.