In Poverty, by America sociologist Matthew Desmond shifts the typical perspective from who is poor, how, and why, to who benefits from poverty.
The answer?
All of us.
In this manifesto Desmond posits poverty in America, something impacting more than 1 in 9 Americans, is not an unfortunate byproduct of our system or a choice made by individuals who just won’t bootstrap harder, but rather a reality by design: some are intentionally kept small so that others can prosper. In other words ours is a system of exploitation.
I found this entire book interesting, I probably made more notations while reading this book than ever before, but I found a few points especially enlightening:
Government aid is primarily spent on the wealthy.
Wealth is needlessly subsidized in America. We spend an incredible amount of money giving tax breaks that benefit the middle and upper classes. Tax breaks for things like mortgage interest, college savings, wealth transfers, and IRAs (don’t even get me started on capital gains and dividends, or the whole corporate welfare topic) subsidize affluence.
For example, let’s examine a single one of these tax breaks: mortgage interest. This is common, right?
Roughly 2/3 Americans are homeowners. But all homeowners don’t automatically receive the mortgage interest tax deduction, in order to qualify you have to itemize your tax deductions. In order to itemize you have to have enough deductions to benefit beyond the standard deduction most of us take. In fact, after the GOP under Trump passed 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which benefitted corporations and wealthy Americans, fewer than 14% of Americans itemize their tax deductions (this down from somewhere around 1 in 3 before.) [Forbes]
How’s that trickle down going? Still waiting?
We spend $190 billion per year on mortgage interest tax deductions compared with $50 billion on housing subsidies for the poor. Only about 1 in 4 people who qualify for housing subsidies actually receive them, waiting lists are years long to participate in the program.
There are certainly theories behind these types of incentives, but investing the massive amounts of money into these tax credits that really aren’t make or break for those taking advantage of them makes no sense when that money could be spent lifting people out of poverty and ensuring basic needs are met.
1% of income earners are responsible for an estimated $175 billion per year in unpaid taxes.
That’s BILLION, with a B, $175,000,000,000 PER YEAR. [WaPo] Expanded to the top 5% and it adds up to $305 billion. That’s a lot of food stamps and housing vouchers.
I’m already approaching this topic from the perspective of money being a construct and poverty being a construct, but a lot of people want to be all, “I’d love for millions of children to not go hungry BUT HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT?!” I’m team ‘eat the rich’ myself, but it sounds like if the ultra wealthy were expected to simply pay their taxes just like the rest of us are that would go a long way to paying for things. In fact, it would roughly be enough to solve poverty entirely. I want you to think about this the next time you hear someone complaining about Biden funding the IRS with the Inflation Reduction Act. (Or anyone complaining about raising the debt ceiling. I’ve got a way to balance your budget right here with, read my lips: no new taxes!)
I was also surprised by the statistics on welfare avoidance and lack of uptake as well as the shocking amount of unspent federal dollars some states are sitting on. (I’m looking right at you Tennessee with your $790 million; must not be any needy families there.)
Poverty is a systemic problem in need of systemic solution, but small steps really do add up to great change and Desmond offers the concept of individuals becoming “anti-poverty” as an important piece of poverty abolition. He essentially says we’re all culpable for the rampant disparity in the US by ignoring the ways we benefit from the status quo, by not demanding better, and by not being involved in the work of change.
This ostensibly looks something like: consumer activism, for example, shopping at stores you know pay living wages; showing up to community meetings where angry suburbanites are opposing low-income housing to express your support; pointing out we could fund a lot of things with an extra $175 billion/year the next time someone you know is pushing a conspiracy theory about IRS funding; wearing a slow fashion ‘eat the rich’ shirt (just kidding, mostly, but it might make you feel better personally.)
I don’t think he’s wrong about any of this, but I do think we have to take one step further back: we have to imagine better for ourselves. I think it’s much too easy to give into division and despair, to see this as an individual issue rather than a systemic one, to buy into the bootstrapping ‘American Dream’. I mean, we recently saw Congress allow a policy to expire that cut child poverty in the US by 50%, thrusting those same children right back to where they started with nary a peep of pushback. (This the expanded child tax credit which gave eligible families $250-300/month.)
This all makes me think about a study recently conducted by the Wall Street Journal which shows “traditional values” such as religion, patriotism, family, and community involvement have declined in importance over the last 25 years, but what has increased in self-reported importance? Money. I imagine things like lack of economic confidence and increasing income disparity among other things are responsible for these findings which hint that this division has an impact on what we consider core values, the things that make us us. It’s hard to prioritize having children if you are already having trouble making ends meet. Likewise it’s hard to care about something like community involvement when you’ve been sold the idea that others are coming to take what’s yours and you must defend it at all costs.
We’re a better version of ourselves when we aren’t constantly confronted by and asked to abide the realities of disparity, when we aren’t operating from a mindset of scarcity, when we are actually working towards living up to our democratic values of liberty, equality, and justice for all.
First we have to see that poverty doesn’t have to exist and our reality is not zero sum; we all do better when we all do better. Then we must confront the ways we’re complicit with the status quo.
(If it isn’t already clear, I think this is a must read.)
Also, Matthew Desmond was recently interviewed about this book and topic on The Ezra Klein Show and I would highly encourage a listen either in place of or as supplement to reading the book.
That Bookish Life 