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'Poverty, by America' author Matthew Desmond examines inequality's root causes :
Shots - Health News Poverty, by America author Matthew Desmond says if the top
1% of Americans paid the taxes they owed, it would raise $175 billion each year:
"That is just about enough to pull everyone out of poverty."


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SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS


PRIVATE OPULENCE, PUBLIC SQUALOR: HOW THE U.S. HELPS THE RICH AND HURTS THE POOR

   
   
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March 21, 202312:45 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air



By 

Dave Davies

PRIVATE OPULENCE, PUBLIC SQUALOR: HOW THE U.S. HELPS THE RICH AND HURTS THE POOR

Listen· 35:4135-Minute ListenPlaylist
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 * Transcript

Enlarge this image

An unhoused individual sleeps under an American flag blanket in New York City on
Sept. 10, 2013. In 2021, approximately 11% of Americans lived below the federal
poverty line. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption
Spencer Platt/Getty Images


An unhoused individual sleeps under an American flag blanket in New York City on
Sept. 10, 2013. In 2021, approximately 11% of Americans lived below the federal
poverty line.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Over 11% of the U.S. population — about one in nine people — lived below the
federal poverty line in 2021. But Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond says
neither that statistic, nor the federal poverty line itself, encapsulate the
full picture of economic insecurity in America.

"There's plenty of poverty above the poverty line as a lived experience,"
Desmond says. "About one in three Americans live in a household that's making
$55,000 or less, and many of those folks aren't officially considered poor. But
what else do you call trying to raise three kids in Portland on $55,000?"

Growing up in a small town in Arizona, Desmond learned firsthand how economic
insecurity could impact a family's stress level. He remembers the gas being shut
off and his family home being foreclosed on. Those hardships would later drive
his research — specifically the question of how so much poverty could exist
within a country as wealthy as the U.S.




BOOK REVIEWS


'POVERTY, BY AMERICA' SHOWS HOW THE REST OF US BENEFIT BY KEEPING OTHERS POOR

Desmond's 2017 book Evicted, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, examined the
nation's affordable housing crisis through the lens of those losing their homes.
His new book, Poverty, by America, studies various factors that contribute to
economic inequality in the U.S., including housing segregation, predatory
lending, the decline of unions and tax policies that favor the wealthy. Desmond
says that affluent Americans, including many with progressive political views,
benefit from corporate and government policies that keep people poor.


NATIONAL


FIRST-EVER EVICTIONS DATABASE SHOWS: 'WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A HOUSING CRISIS'

"Most government aid goes to families that need it the least," Desmond says. "If
you add up the amount that the government is dedicating to tax breaks — mortgage
interest deduction, wealth transfer tax breaks, tax breaks we get on our
retirement accounts, our health insurance, our college savings accounts — you
learn that we are doing so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate
poverty."

Despite the daunting statistics, Desmond remains optimistic that the U.S. can
make progress in its war on poverty. He says that labor unions and housing
activists are creating movements that are "stirring and growing around the
country."


THE PICTURE SHOW


HOW ONE PHOTOGRAPHER IS USING HIS CAMERA AS A WEAPON AGAINST POVERTY AND RACISM

"My hope, too, is in the fact that ending poverty in America is better for all
of us," he says. "It is clearly better for folks that are facing homelessness
and hunger and humiliation. But it's also better for those of us who have found
security that are diminished and depressed by all this poverty in our midst. So
I do think there's quite a lot to be hopeful about."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Enlarge this image

Crown

Crown

On what we can learn from LBJ's "war on poverty"

The poverty rate between 1964 and '74 fell by half. So the "Great Society" and
the war on poverty made an incredible difference. ... These were really robust
interventions into the lives of the poorest families in America. They made food
aid permanent. They expanded Social Security. There were so many elderly
Americans dying penniless before the war on poverty and the Great Society. And
there was this massive gain in pulling older folks out of poverty. ...



And I feel that that should give us a lot of hope, actually, because there's
some of us that say, "Well, government aid doesn't work. It's not powerful." But
the Great Society in the war on poverty have this incredibly historical
precedent for the good work the government can do.

And it's also important to realize that when those programs [were] rolled out,
Congress looked a lot like Congress does now. It was polarized. It was
obstructionary. The Southern Democrats were aligning with Republicans to block
progressive reform. And even in that situation — a situation that looks a lot
like Washington today — these incredible reforms were passed. So why? And I
think the reason is — and this is an idea that I borrowed from Julian Zelizer's
fantastic book, The Fierce Urgency of Now -- the reason is grassroots
organizers, like the civil rights movement and the labor movements in
particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers to move their hand. So I think
if we want to confront this problem, I think that our hope lies in the movement.

On how homeowner tax breaks help the wealthy at the expense of the poor

If we're homeowners and ... we deduct the interest of our mortgage from our tax
bill — that's a government benefit. And many of us say, "Well, that's very
different than a housing subsidy or food stamps." But I disagree. Both of those
things cost the government money. Both of those things drive up the deficit. And
both of those things put money in our pocket. So instead of taking the mortgage
interest deduction, the government could just mail you a check. That would be
the savings you would take. So it's the same difference. ...

If you look at the amount of money we spent on homeowner tax subsidies, like the
mortgage interest deduction, that's around $190 billion a year. Well, how much
have we dedicated to housing assistance for low-income families? About $50
billion a year. So it's just a colossal difference. And, you know, if we didn't
have so many evictions and so many families paying 50, 60, 70% of their income
on rent today, maybe we could live with that inequality. But it doesn't make any
sense to have an enormous, painful rental housing crisis and to be spending so
much money on mostly families with six-figure incomes who are the biggest
beneficiaries of the mortgage deduction.



And I guess what really angers me even about this conversation is that a lot of
times when we put forward a proposal to stabilize people's housing situation or
cut child poverty in half, we hear over and over and over again, how can we
afford it? How can we afford it? And the answer staring us right in the face
like we can afford it if many of us took a little less from the government.

On the decline in the investment in public services

When you have a country like ours, where there are millions of poor people
living alongside millions of people with considerable means, a system locks in —
a system for private opulence and public squalor.

Matthew Desmond

When you have a country like ours, where there are millions of poor people
living alongside millions of people with considerable means, a system locks in —
a system for private opulence and public squalor. And this is an old phrase. It
goes back to the Roman time. But it was really brought out and brought to life
by the mid-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his wonderful book, The
Affluent Society.

And it goes a little something like this: If you are a family of means, you have
the incentive to rely less and less on the public sector. So we used to want to
be free of bosses, but now we want to be free of bus drivers. We don't want to
take the bus. We don't want to often enroll our kids in the public school
system. We don't need to play in the public park or swim in the public pool. We
have our own clubs, our own schools. We have our own cars. And as we withdraw
into the private opulence, we have less and less incentive to invest in public
services.

On the politicization of government aid


NATIONAL


THE U.S. NEEDS MORE AFFORDABLE HOUSING – WHERE TO PUT IT IS A BIGGER BATTLE

A lot of us are getting these tax breaks and we don't see that as a government
helping us. We see that as us getting to keep more of what is rightfully ours.
And often that leads to a kind of attitude, a political attitude, where we don't
think the government is in our lives. And so those of us who are more apt to
take that mortgage interest deduction are also more apt to vote against
affordable housing proposals. Those of us who already have employer-sponsored
health insurance — which by the way, is government subsidized in a massive way —
we're often apt to vote against the Affordable Care Act. And so it does have
this kind of strange political, maddening irony in our lives.



On the tax breaks for the wealthy

This one statistic that I calculated just blew me away. So a recent study was
published and it showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they
owed, not paid more taxes, ... we as a nation could raise an additional $175
billion every year. That is just about enough to pull everyone out of poverty,
every parent, every child, every grandparent. So we clearly have the resources
to do this. It is not hard.

Enlarge this image

Matthew Desmond is a MacArthur Fellow and a principal investigator of the
Eviction Lab, a research project focusing on poverty, city life, housing
insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography. Barron
Bixler/Penguin Random House hide caption

toggle caption
Barron Bixler/Penguin Random House


Matthew Desmond is a MacArthur Fellow and a principal investigator of the
Eviction Lab, a research project focusing on poverty, city life, housing
insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography.

Barron Bixler/Penguin Random House

This is a rough estimate. I arrive at this number by looking at everyone under
the poverty line, calculating the average it would take to just bring them over
the poverty line and adding that all up. It's pretty equivalent to what we could
earn by just enforcing fair taxes at the very top of the market. What else could
we do with $175 billion? We could more than double our investment in affordable
housing. We could reestablish the extended child tax credit that we rolled out
during COVID. ... [That]was basically a check for middle and low-income families
with kids. That's all it was. And that simple intervention cut child poverty
almost in half in six months. We could bring that back again with $175 billion
and still have money left over.


SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS


MEDICAID RENEWALS ARE STARTING. THOSE WHO DON'T REENROLL COULD GET KICKED OFF

On how simple interventions could make a huge impact

A lot of us thought that people weren't applying for food stamps or applying for
wage supplements because they were stigmatized. They were embarrassed, and there
is something to that. But the weight of the evidence, I think, suggests that the
reason people aren't accessing aid is because it's confusing [and] hard to apply
for. Often you have to apply every year again and again, and people often lose
their aid just because they couldn't make the appointment or forgot to reapply.



And so [there are] small, tiny interventions that address those problems [and]
see massive returns on people accessing aid that they need. For example, if you
make the font bigger and clearer and use less words, you can get many more
people applying for the Earned Income Tax Credit. This benefit is designed to
lift poor working families out of poverty. If you connect elderly folks with
someone that just kind of walks them through the application process of applying
for food stamps, you get many more folks in their silver years having access to
more food security. ... There are just these incredibly simple interventions
that can get people connected to aid, and we should put those in place
immediately.

Audio interview produced and edited by: Heidi Saman and Susan Nyakundi. Audio
interview adapted for NPR.org by: Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel
Wroth.

 * social determinants of health
 * income inequality

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