Matthew Desmond: The Privileged are Complicit in America’s Poverty Crisis | Amanpour and Company

climate disruption of course as to Global poverty our next guest believes that can be eradicated but only by getting enough people to make the change despite being the richest country the United States has a higher rate of poverty than any other Advanced democracy Pulitzer prize-winning author Matthew Desmond examines the dire situation in his new book and he's joining Michelle Martin to explain why the problem persists this conversation is part of our ongoing initiative about poverty jobs and Economic Opportunity in America called Chasing the Dream thanks Christian professor Matthew Desmond thank you so much for talking with us once again oh it's pleasure to be back the last time we talked with you we talked about your book evicted uh critically acclaimed a bestseller it just as the title implies it dug into the origins and the scope of the eviction phenomenon in the U.S now your latest book poverty by America kind of deals with similar ideas but it feels different I mean in a way it feels like a book that you've been kind of waiting to write your whole life do you want to talk a little bit about that yeah that's right you know I've been researching and Reporting on poverty all of my adult life I've lived in really poor neighborhoods I've done into the dug into the statistics but I I just didn't feel like I had an answer to this really pressing question which is why why there's so much poverty in this incredibly rich country and so this book is my response to that question I think I think there's always been something about the American poverty debate that didn't sit well with me and I remember reading a line by the novelist Tommy orange where he writes these kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings falling to their deaths and we think that the problem is that they're jumping and when I read that I was like man that sounds like the poverty debate and we have been focused so much on the poor themselves and we needed to be focusing on the fire you know who lit it who's warming their hands by it so this is a book about the fire this is a book about how some lives are made small So Others May grow you say that poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on Addiction on and on it goes talk a little bit about some of the people that you profile in the book and the way you say that poverty kind of isn't just one thing it's a thing that piles on and folds in on itself yeah that's right I mean when I was spending time in Milwaukee for my last book I met grandmothers living without heat in Wisconsin you know sleeping under blankets all winter long praying that the space heater didn't go out I I saw kids evicted all the time the courtroom in the eviction court room is just brimming over with with children facing homelessness and eviction every day in that City and cities all across the country you know America harbors hard bottom layer of poverty and it's not just about a lack of money it's about a lack of choice it's about pain it's about humiliation it's about the nauseating fear of eviction on and on it goes which I think should spur us to moral action you know it could really drive us to address this problem because poverty isn't just a lack of income it's this exhausting collection of socialities and problems is it your argument that the United States is is fairly unique in that among affluent Nations that you just don't find appear economies in which the the level of misery is what it is in the United States that's right we really are in a class all our own when it comes to the level of poverty that we tolerate amongst all this wealth there's no other Advanced democracy that has the kind of poverty that we do and the depths of poverty that we have and you know while abroad I've often heard Europeans use the phrase American style deprivation you know they can see it um our child poverty rate is twice what it is in Germany or South Korea or Canada for example we are really lagging behind other Advanced democracies when it comes to addressing poverty in our borders your point of view is that poverty persists in the way that it persists because the non-poor benefit from it why do you say that well we often consume the cheap goods and services that the Working Poor produce now those of us invested in the stock market like healthy returns even though those returns often come at the cost of a human sacrifice with poorly paid labor a lot of us really protect our tax breaks like our mortgage interest deduction but those tax breaks really accrue to the wealthiest Among Us and doing so Stars anti-poverty programs because we invest a lot more in subsidizing affluence than alleviating deprivation and then the country continues to be segregationist we continue to build walls around our communities and hoard opportunity behind those walls we need to tear down those walls and we need to start taking responsibility for all this scarcity in our midst let's just put this into different buckets if we can although you make the argument that it's all related so let's just talk about direct government subsidies you know per se one of the things you point out in the book is that from 1980 to 2017 there was a 237 percent increase in federal spending on poverty programs that's not a small amount of money I mean just in total dollar terms so why is it that the kind of misery you describe persists given that level of spending well some might say it's because government spending doesn't have a real effect on poverty but that's just wrong you know there's a massive pile of research that shows that government programs directed at our poorest families are incredibly effective even efficient they prevent millions of families from pledging into hunger and homelessness every year but they clearly aren't enough right now and part of the reason is because we have not fully addressed the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor market in the housing market and in the financial Market let me just give you one quick statistic every day 61 million dollars are pulled out of the pockets of poor families in terms of overdraft fees check cashing fees payday loan fees every single day you know when James Baldwin wrote how expensive it is to be poor he couldn't even imagine those kind of numbers and so unless we address that exploitation we're not going to build sturdy permanent foundation on which we can climb out of poverty for everyone well one of the other points you make though is that even with direct federal assistance that in in in most places actually you say that the majority of that money doesn't actually get directly to people who are under resourced that there are only two states where a majority of their assistants under the TANF program which is the main uh used to be called welfare maybe still is actually goes directly into cash assistance that Most states it goes other places where does it go yeah what does that money do yeah let's break it down there's kind of two two points that I think are important here one point is that a dollar in the federal budget doesn't mean a dollar in a family's pocket so you take this program called TANF or cash welfare uh for every dollar budgeted for TANF only 22 cents ends up with a family in terms of direct Aid why well because States get a lot of leeway about how they spend their money and they're really creative about how to do it you know states have used that money to spend on Christian summer camps or abstinence only classes marriage initiatives things like that many of these things don't have anything to do with reducing poverty other states just simply sit on the money you know Tennessee last time I checked was sitting on over 700 million dollars in unspent welfare funds Hawaii was sitting on enough to give every poor kid in its state ten thousand dollars so that's one thing that's going on and the second thing that's going on that's important is that a lot of poor families don't take advantage of programs that they need and deserve we hear a lot about welfare dependency but if you look at the data the bigger problem is welfare avoidance the fact that families are leaving billions and billions of dollars on the table every year you know one in five elderly Americans for example who could qualify and receive Food Stamps they don't take advantage of that why why is that is it just too hard that it's actually just the actual process of getting these benefits is just too hard or or why don't people get it or because there's a stigma attached to it or because they make it humiliating for people to get it what why why is it that people don't get the benefits that they actually are entitled to yeah all that is part of it and we used to think stigma was the biggest reason why folks weren't relying on these programs but it seems a much bigger reason is that we've made them unnecessarily hard and complicated we've wrapped these programs and red tape and regulations and we may make it incredibly confusing this is also very hopeful though you know there are studies that show that just like increasing the font or connecting to people with someone on the phone can actually bring a lot more benefits to families that that need them today you know one exception to that of course was during the covet crisis when the government made an effort the federal government made aggressive efforts to kind of get money to people directly and of course there was there was a lot of debate and grinching about that I mean some there were some people who said oh my gosh you know it's it's we're paying people not to work but just in that time period in which the federal government was supporting was offering additional cash assistance to people because of the covert crisis did that make a difference in alleviating poverty for some people made a huge difference historic difference we were able to reduce child poverty by 46 percent in six months six months how we expanded the child tax credit which was just basically a check mailed to families with moderate and low incomes cut child poverty almost in half we reduced evictions to Historic lows months and months and months after the eviction moratorium ended renters finally got a breath and were able to stay in their home and not face homelessness during the pandemic and it didn't seem to cost jobs you know when some states got rid of those extra benefits early and other states didn't the states that got rid of the benefits they didn't see their job numbers jump up job growth is basically tied between states that kept some of the benefits and those that didn't so we made these historic incredible investments in reducing poverty I would like that to become the new normal and let's talk about sort of non-cash the kind of non-cash non-direct government um you know Assistance or lack thereof talk about the ways in which you feel like these income subsidies were down to the benefit of the middle class and the upper class upper middle class and not necessarily to the poor talk a little bit about that if you would give one or two examples sure when we think about the welfare state we usually think about cash welfare public housing things like that but we should we should also think about things like the mortgage interest deduction uh the 529 savings plan uh cash break excuse me tax breaks we get for wealth transfers in America that's also part of the welfare state you know both uh tax break and a government check cost the government money and both of those put put income in someone's pocket and so if you add up all the benefits that the government is Doling out social insurance tax breaks means tested programs to the poorest families you learn that every year in America the top 20 of us receive about thirty six thousand dollars from the government and the bottom twenty percent receive only twenty five thousand dollars from the government that's almost a forty percent difference we're doing a lot more to guard fortunes than we are to expand opportunity Grace plays in this because one of the things I I noticed about the book is that you know race is a part of it but race isn't all of it but I am interested in whether you think that there's an interplay between the way we think about race the way we act on race in this country and the way these systems persist yeah absolutely there is it's impossible to write a book about poverty in the United States with also without also writing a book about about race and racism in the United States a big way race a big role race plays in the story is is segregation you know white Americans and especially white affluent Americans continue to be the most segregated group in the country you know uh we've built these communities where basically the only folks that can live in the communities are are affluent homeowners the majority of whom are white in this country and so thinking about an end of poverty is also thinking about how to tear down those walls and embrace kind of open more inclusive communities and so race plays a huge role there it also plays a huge role into like how people see and understand the poor there's a lot of really discouraging studies that show that folks are more likely to vote Yes on an anti-poverty program if they think the benefit isn't going to uh African-American families that's really discouraging and so I think that the country's Legacy of racism and the country's Legacy of economic exploitation have gone hand in hand since the founding the book has been incredibly well received I've been really interested in that I'm curious what you make of it I think the country is ready for this conversation I think there's so many of us that are fed up with the old tropes and old stories of poverty and bootstrapping and responsibility and I think that we want a more fair Society I think many of us who are not poor many of us who are privileged feel complicit in all this poverty around us and it drags us all down and so many of us are struggling also want a language and a new story about why it's so hard to get ahead in the land of the free so I I don't know I I think that there's you know this is a driving issue of our day this is a morally urgent issue that many Americans uh want to have this conversation yeah you did not grow up wealthy in fact you talk about it very openly in the book and I think very movingly you've experienced your parents losing their job you've experienced losing your home because of it you've experienced having to work really hard to get through school not having all the choices that you wanted to make how do you understand your own story in the context of all this I was given opportunities from the government I was giving things like student loans and we often don't think about a student loan is a government program but it is uh I was given uh tuition remission at my State University that helped a lot um and I think that I was able to recognize the way that the government intervened in my life in ways that really did result in social climbing and I want a government that does more of that for everyone I want a government that is truly obsessively committed to ending poverty because I think that's a government that's obsessively committed to freedom and happiness in equal opportunity and so if that means that I need to give up a few things that I now receive because of you know I'm a member of the professional class that's totally a bargain I'm willing to make so for example you know could it be the case that homeowners who get this big benefit from the government the mortgage interest deduction start really thinking about that you know in 2020 we as a nation spend 190 billion dollars on homeowner subsidies but only 53 billion dollars on Direct housing assistance to the needy in in a world where eviction is commonplace in a world where most renting families spend at least half of what they have on housing costs that seems to be out of luck with our values and our priorities I'd like to bring that more into balance professor Matthew Desmond thanks so much for talking with us today thanks Michelle always a pleasure and privilege [Music] foreign

Channel: Amanpour and Company

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Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, Matthew Desmond, Poverty By America, Michel Martin, Povery, Economic Opportunity, Evicted

Id: 95we_UcQh2I

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2023