Even though AZ Gov. Katie Hobbs knows that proposals relating to school choice — the important ones for the budget would be requiring voucher users to have 100 days enrolled in a public school and repealing the state’s private school scholarship tax credit program — are dead on arrival in the legislative chambers, she’s more interested in getting the information to voters that Republicans are backing out-of-control, unaccountable spending and handouts to the wealthy than right now. (Democrats are already laying the groundwork to embark on an all-out war to capture control of the Arizona legislature for the first time since the mid-1960s)
Worldwide, the Guardian reported on Sunday that the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money.
In Matthew Desmond’s book, Poverty, In America, he makes the case that poverty could be abolished here nearly overnight If you simply just taxed capital and the rich more and stopped given a leg up to people that already have wealth accumulation and targeted those government funds into people who are actually poor, without adding a dime to the deficit. Our entire tax and banking systems are designed for people who already have money, and penalize those who do not.
I pulled out several passages from the book that resonated with me…a long read but I think it mostly encapsulates the point of the book:
In the land of the free, you can drop all the way down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “ragged proletariat”). According to the latest national data, one in eighteen people in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level of scarcity. Take the poverty line and cut it in half: Anything below that is considered deep poverty. The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380 annually for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year, almost 18 million people in America survived under these conditions. The United States allows a much higher proportion of its children—over 5 million of them—to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations.
Roughly one in three families headed by a single mother is poor, compared to just one in seventeen married families. This disparity has led some to conclude that single parenthood is a major cause of poverty in America.
But then, why isn’t it a major cause in Ireland or Italy or Sweden? A study of eighteen rich democracies found that single mothers outside the United States were not poorer than the general population. Countries that make the deepest investments in their people, particularly through universal programs that benefit all citizens, have the lowest rates of poverty, including among households headed by single mothers. We could follow suit by investing in programs to help single parents balance work and family life, programs such as paid family leave, affordable childcare, and universal pre-K. Instead, we’ve increasingly privatized daycare and summer programming, effectively reserving these modern-day necessities for the affluent. In doing so, we’ve made it impossible for many single parents to go back to school or work full-time. Choosing to have a child outside of marriage may be an individual choice, but condemning many of those parents and their children to a life of poverty is a societal one.
Most people in prison are parents Men have been taken from the families by the tens and hundreds of thousands, then by the millions. Poor black and Hispanic families have paid the highest price. Other countries, like Germany, permit their incarcerated citizens to visit family members outside detention centers, but the American prison system seems designed to break up all sorts of relationships. By one estimate, the number of marriages in the United States would increase by as much as 30 percent if we didn’t imprison a single person. America’s obsession with incarceration has removed scores of poor people from their families, strictly controlling when they can call their children, spouses, and loved ones, and then releasing them back into society with a criminal record that impedes their already dim job and housing prospects. In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.
…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 arrangements, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises, and decent pay with some benefits. As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. That’s been the story of the American working class and working poor, anyway.
Every year: over $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion on check cashing fees, and up to $9.8 billion in payday loan fees. That’s over $61 million in fees collected predominantly from low-income Americans each day—not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-to-own schemes. When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” he couldn’t have imagined those receipts.
The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation. This is all perfectly legal, after all, and subsidized by the nation’s richest commercial banks. The fringe banking sector would not exist without lines of credit extended by the conventional one. Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase bankroll payday lenders like Advance America and Cash America. It’s expropriators all the way down, orders from the East and all that. Everybody gets a cut.
In Tommy orange’s début novel, There There, a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says, “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they are jumping.” The poverty debate has suffered from a different kind of myopia. For the past half century, we’ve approached the poverty question by attending to the poor themselves—posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits—when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not Why don’t you find a better job? Or Why don’t you move? Or Why don’t you stop taking out such bad loans? But Who is feeding off this?
Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top 1 percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can’t tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I’ve me far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.
Those who benefit most from government largesse—generally white families with accountants—harbor the strongest antigovernment sentiments. And those people vote at higher rates than their fellow citizens who appreciate the role of government in their lives. They lend their support to politicians who promise to cut government spending, knowing full well that it won’t be their benefits that get the ax. Overwhelmingly, voters who claim the mortgage interest deduction are the very ones who oppose deeper investments in affordable housing, just as those who received employer-sponsored health insurance were the ones pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It’s one of the more maddening paradoxes of political life.
With respect to the federal income tax, some believe that middle-class taxpayers are carrying the poor on their backs. But let’s look at the data. In 2018, the average middle-class family had an income of $63,900, paid $9,900 in federal taxes after all the deductions, and received $13,600 in social insurance benefits (like disability and unemployment) along with $3,400 from means-tested programs (like Medicaid and food stamps). In other words, the average middle-class family received $7,100 more in government aid than it paid in federal taxes, a serious return on investment. The claim that middle-class Americans are subsidizing the poor with their tax dollars and receiving nothing in return just isn’t true.
How do we, today, make the poor in America poor? In at least three ways. First, we exploit them. We constrain their choice and power in the labor market, the housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Those of us who are not poor benefit from these arrangements…Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty. The United Sates could effectively end poverty in Americas tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes, reallocating the newfound revenue to those most in need of it. Instead, we let the rich slide and give the most to those who have plenty already, creating a welfare state that heavily favors the upper class. And then our elected officials have the audacity—the shamelessness, really—to fabricate stories about poor people’s dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce poverty because they would cost too much…Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair—the externality of stockpiled opportunity. Wealth traps breed poverty traps. The concentration of affluence breeds more affluence, and concentration of poverty, more poverty. To be poor is miserable, but to be poor and surrounded by poverty on all sides is a much deeper cut.
Ideas for a new kind of labor law were the result of a two-year effort that brought together more than seventy union leaders, academics, advocates, and workers from around the world to sketch a blueprint for how to empower labor in the twenty-first century. The collectives 2020 report, Clean Slate for Worker Power, champions plenty of other solutions, too, including mandating that corporate boards have significant worker representation and levying heavy penalties on companies that thwart organizing efforts. These proposals are not anti-capitalist; they are anti-exploitation, anti-raw-deal, anti-purposeless-and-grotesque-inequality. (Orwell once said that “we could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.”) These are calls for a capitalism that serves the people, not the other way around.
As Nietzsche wrote, “One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.” Integration means we all have skin in the game. It not only disrupts poverty; on a spiritual level, over time it can foster empathy and solidarity. This is why opposing segregation is vital to poverty abolitionism.
Let’s call it scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable—or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources….” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.
The opposite of the scarcity diversion is a recognition of the nation’s bounty. The ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has recently advocated for “an economy of abundance.” Why do we continue to accept scarcity as given, treating it as the central organizing principle of our economics, policymaking, city planning, and personal ethics? Why do we continue to act like the farmer who, upon learning that hid dog is lying on a pile of hay meant for cattle to eat and baring his teeth when the cows come near, chooses to drop their rations, feeding them with what scraps he can snatch from the edge of the pile? Why don’t we just move the dog?
Alicia Garza, co-creator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network out it, “To build the kind of movement that we need to get the things that we deserve, we can’t be afraid to establish a base that is larger than the people we feel comfortable with.” That is, “We have to reach beyond the choir.”
Antipoverty movements are doing just that. People’s Action (whose tagline is “Join our joyous rebellion”) has brought rural and urban poor and working-class families together to campaign for housing justice and healthcare for all. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend William Barber—who has found receptive audiences among struggling Black families in deep-blue cities and struggling white families in deep-red rural counties—advocates for “fusion coalitions” made up of people of different faiths. Ethnicities, and political identities joining together and demanding change “from a moral perspective.” Poverty abolitionism transcends partisan divides because, frankly, poor and working-class people deserve more than either party has delivered for them over the past fifty years. Visionary organizers don’t view “those people”—liberals or conservatives, the young or the old, undocumented immigrants or citizens—as adversaries but as potential allies in the fight against poverty. They ascribe to the old political wisdom that there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent issues. This can be slow, fraught work, and also electrifying and invigorating work, much like democracy itself. Perhaps the reason protestors often chant “This is what democracy looks like” is because we can so easily forget.
You can purchase Poverty, In America by Matthew Desmond at Antigone Books in Tucson or at the Raven Book Store in LFK. I checked mine out at the Pima County Public Library, also an option.
Here are some cute kittens…
And now…
Thanks for the excerpt from Poverty.