"Poverty, by America": Author Matthew Desmond on How U.S. Punishes the Poor & Rewards the Wealthy

this is democracy Now democracynow.org The War and Peace report I'm Amy Goodman in New York with Juan Gonzalez in Chicago Republican house Speaker Kevin McCarthy has proposed increasing the debt ceiling for a year in exchange for sweeping budget cuts that would likely result in Less Federal money for housing Education Health Care and the environment McCarthy also pushed for tuck for work requirements for recipients of snap that's the supplemental nutrition assistance program and to expand domestic Mining and fossil fuel production McCarthy outlined his plan in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street before we borrow another dime we owe it to our children to save money everywhere our proposal will examine wasteful Washington spending and executive overreach in all forms the White House slams speaker McCarthy's proposal warning it would impose devastating cuts on families and take health care and food assistance away from millions of people this comes as a new study in the journal the American Medical Association Jama published on Monday found that poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States just behind heart disease cancer and smoking the study linked to 183 000 deaths in the United States in 2019 directly to Poverty that's an average 500 deaths from poverty every day well today we spend the rest of the hour looking at how there can be so much poverty in the richest country in the world we're joined by Matthew Desmond he's author of the new book poverty by America it's Matthew Desmond's first book since he won the Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking 2013 book evicted poverty and profit in the American city evicted something he knew well as his family was evicted Matthew Desmond is a sociologist now at Princeton University where he's director of the eviction lab Professor Desmond Matthew thank you so much for joining us this book is a bombshell it is epic you the title of your book poverty by America doesn't talk about how is it possible that the richest country in the world can have so much poverty but you say that it's because of its wealth there are so many poor lay out the scope of the problem and why you took this on because there is so much poverty in this land of dollars you know if you just look at the official poverty line there's 38 million of us living below it that means that if the American poor founded a country that country would be bigger than Australia but the poverty line is incredibly low you know one in three folks in America live in homes bringing in fifty five thousand dollars or less many artificially counted as poor but what else do you call living on 55k and trying to raise two young kids in Miami or Portland there's an incredible amount of unnecessary scarcity in this land of abundance so this book is about why and this is a book about how we can finally abolish it and if you could summarize some of the main reasons why especially given how other wealthy countries don't have nearly the the level of poverty that the United States does it's an important point you know our child poverty rate for example is double double that of South Korea Germany many other of our Pure Nations so why and in a nutshell there's so much poverty in America not in spite of our wealth but because of it some lives are made small so That Others May grow and many of us those of us who have found some privilege and prosperity in America we contribute to this you know we consume the cheap goods and services the Working Poor produce we benefit when the stock market goes up because labor costs are pushed down many of us get tax breaks from the government which is an enormous part of government spending and we protect those tax breaks which starves anti-poverty programs and then we continue to be segregationists in America building walls around astronaut communities and concentrated not only wealth and privilege but also concentrating poverty many of us are connected to the problem and the solution we often hear uh conservatives in the United States talk about the welfare state but uh you make the point that the cut our country actually is subsidizing the affluent can you and give some specifics about how that happens so every year we spend about 1.8 trillion dollars on tax breaks that's about double what we spend on the military it's a colossal sum and look many of us who receive those tax breaks we have a hard time seeing those as the same thing as food stamps or housing assistance but both housing assistants and say the mortgage interest deduction they both cost the government money they both put money in a family's pocket and they both increase the deficit and so if you add up all the tax breaks that are going to families and all the means tested programs the poorest families and all the social insurance programs basically everything that government does for its people you learn that every year families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receive about twenty five thousand dollars a year from the government but every year families in the top 20 percent of the income distribution our richest families receive about thirty six thousand dollars from the government that's almost a forty percent difference that's crazy to me and our country does a much better job helping folks that have plenty already than it does eliminating and fighting poverty this is an absolutely critical um figure that you're saying Matthew Desmond because so often the argument about against helping the poor is why should they get free money when no one else does and you're pointing out actually it's the opposite that wealthier people get more money from the government than poorer people do but I'd like you to continue on that point and talk about why in fact already in this country there are millions of dollars available to people who are in the lowest economic bracket that they can't or don't take advantage of explain what are the obstacles in the way one obstacle is we do a very bad job connecting families to programs that they need and deserve sometimes we literally just don't spend the money on fighting poverty so if you look at a program like the temporary assistance and needy families program or TANF this is Cash welfare for every dollar budgeted for TANF only 22 cents ends up in the family's pocket what's going on here well states have a lot of discretion about how to spend the money and they spend it in really creative ways some states use those dollars to fund Christian summer camps or abstinence only education marriage initiatives things that have nothing to do with alleviating poverty many states don't even spend the money last time I checked Tennessee was sitting on over 700 million dollars on unspent welfare dollars and so this is one way that that money doesn't reach the families that need it the most and another way is that many families are just leaving a lot of money on the table you know one in five folks that are poorly paid workers that could receive something called the earn income tax credit this wage bump they don't they don't take it most elderly Americans that could receive Food Stamps they don't take it and so if you add all that up you learn that every year over 140 billion dollars billion with a B of unspent Aid is left on the table this is not a picture of welfare dependency this is a picture of welfare avoidance the fact that we as a nation need to do a much better job connecting families to those programs yeah the crisis of the pandemic teach us about the ability of government to make a significant dense in poverty and uh and then of course once the the the worst of the pandemic was over we've seen now uh a a take back of those policies exactly so there's two resounding lessons from the pandemic when it comes to Poverty alleviation one organizing Works social movements pushed for bold relief from the government and they won and that relief came and the second big lesson is that relief makes a world of difference during the pandemic we rolled out something called the extended child tax credit which was basically a subsidy to low and moderate income families with kids and that simple program cut child poverty by 46 in six months in six months it was the most historic thing we've done to fight poverty since the war on poverty increase Society in 1964. another thing that we did was we rolled out emergency rental relief we helped the renters that had fallen behind because they had lost their jobs during the pandemic and that initiative made evictions fall to record lows we've never seen evictions this low on record and those evictions stayed low for months and months and months even after the federal moratorium on evictions was lifted these programs were transformative but you're right Juan they they are lifting they're expiring you know and frankly I want to live in a country where a congress should have been terrified of taking those benefits away I want to live in a country where more of us said no I want this to be the new normal so professor Matthew Desmond you just talked about evictions you won the Pulitzer Prize for your book evicted talk about your own life experience and what eviction means so I grew up in a little town in northern Arizona railroad town and my family money was tight and um when my dad lost his job as a minister we lost our home and I helped my parents move into a small rental unit and I think that's that experience worked its way inside of me probably provoked me to study evictions later on in life and I moved to Milwaukee and I moved into a mobile home park and a rooming house in the inner city of Milwaukee and followed families getting evicted and what I saw was eviction causes tremendous loss families lose their homes of course but they often lose their stuff which is piled on the street or taken by movers kids lose their school eviction comes with this Mark of blemish which can prevent you from moving in a good neighborhood and good housing because many landlords see that Mark that court record and they say no thanks and so we push those families into worse housing and we push those families into high crime neighborhoods eviction causes job loss and if any of you listening or watching today have been evicted you know exactly why that is it's such a consuming stressful event it can cause you to make mistakes at work and lose your footing in the labor market and then there's the eviction mark on your soul your mental health and when you add all that up I think we have to conclude that evictions which used to be rare in this country which used to draw crowds evictions are not just a condition of poverty they're a cause of it they're making things worse and they're leaving a deep and Jagged scar on the Next Generation uh the the political impacts of this debate of Donald Trump is all is often talked about as having enormous appeal in rural White America and some of the poorest states in the union have delivered the biggest votes for Trump places like West Virginia Kentucky Mississippi wondering you're us uh your sense of this account of why Trump appeals uh uh to a poor white Americans I think it's hard to answer that question without recognizing the racial element of the appeal when Trump started his presidential run famously he was disparaging Mexicans and immigrants there's very little evidence that immigrants dragged down wages for Native Native workers or contributing to poverty in America at all but it really has a deep cultural resonance with a lot of Americans who are white and who are in struggling economic areas there is a a connection here on the ground though that I think is often overlooked in the politics which is on basic issues of economic fairness and Justice there's a lot less polarization than we often see in Washington most Americans want a higher minimum wage most Americans think that the rich aren't paying their fair share taxes most Americans Democrat and Republican believe now that poverty isn't caused by a moral failing that is caused by unfair circumstances the electives are very polarized but on the ground I think there's a lot of Americans that want a uh they want more opportunity they want less poverty and they want less inequality on both sides of the aisle um Professor Desmond I wanted to ask you about um your comment that many well-off Americans quote are unwinning enemies of the poor and this goes to the issue of solutions explain how so if we just look at tax breaks for example so many of us who are homeowners who receive something called the mortgage interest deduction we can just deduct the interest of our mortgage every year at tax time and if you look at that deduction and you look at everything that homeowner subsidies amount to you know in 2021 we as a nation spend 193 billion dollars on those benefits and only 53 billion dollars on Direct housing assistance to the needy public housing Section 8 so it's a big imbalance most of those property owner deductions they went to families with six figure incomes you also have to face the fact that most white Americans uh today are homeowners and they benefit from one of the sweetest cutouts in the tax code but most black and latinx families are not because of our systematic dispossession of people of color from the land and so it's a really it's really hard to think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying racial and economic inequalities than that system does and many of us are protective of those tax breaks and so this book is a call to reevaluate our values it's not a call for redistribution I don't think it is a call for rebalancing our safety net I want a country that does a lot more to fight poverty than it does to guard fortunes changing nature of work and the job market over the years and how that's affected uh uh definitions or how people see themselves as poor or not that you've you've said that your grandparents had careers but this generation has gigs uh how does that relate to Poverty it's huge it's a huge part of the story so after World War II um the job market really delivered for many Americans for decades you know in the 1970s one in three of us belonged to a union uh worker pay was climbing real wages inflation-adjusted wages increased by two percent every year uh if you had a job for Ford you worked four Ford and you could advance in that company you got some benefits you got some pride but as workers started to lose power as unions started to be destroyed and dismantled our jobs got a lot worse and if you look at the real pay the worker the inflation-adjusted wages for men without college degrees today it's actually lower than it was 50 years ago benefits have gone away and many of us who are working for four Now or Apple or Google that's not the companies those companies don't sign our checks right we're independent contractors without a lot of benefits and with a lot of without a lot of room for advancement the deterioration of the American job means that you know the government has to do more to fight poverty when the war on poverty and Great Society were launched the job market was strong and it was kind of a one-two punch deep government Investments along with the job market that was delivering that massively cut poverty in America today the job market just isn't pulling its weight and this is one of the reasons that we don't just need deeper Investments we need different ones and one of those Investments is finding ways to empower more American workers you've called for poverty abolition and this goes right to your previous point lay out the ways poverty can be abolished and again that point you made earlier that the pandemic taught us so much for example having cutting in half child poverty within six months and then the U.S Congress votes to do away with that program throwing Millions more children into poverty right exactly you know study came out a few years ago that showed that at the top one percent just pay the taxes they owed not paid more taxes just stop debating taxes that we as a nation could raise an additional 175 billion dollars that's more than enough money to re-establish that child tax credit you know that's enough money to double our investment in affordable housing and still have money left over that's basically enough money to lift everyone under the official poverty line above the line we have the resources we know how to do it so when we're met with this kind of question about how could we afford this how could we afford to cut child poverty half or make sure every family in America has a decent affordable home I feel like those questions are sinful and dishonest the answer is staring us straight in the face we can afford it if the richest Among Us took less from the government we could afford it if we designed a welfare state to do less to subsidize affluence and more to eradicate poverty so how do we get there we need deeper investments in the issue which is funded by tax fairness and enforcement we can go deeper we also need different programs programs that attack the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor market and then the housing market especially and then finally our walls they have to go we have to end segregation in America and strive for broad open Prosperity now this sounds like a policy discussion right but it's also a personal commitment so a call for poverty abolitionism is not just about voting the right way or signing up to join a social movement it's also about ways that we need to interrogate our everyday lives and commit ourselves to divesting from poverty in our consumer choices our neighborhood choices and all the little ways that we go about our life that unwittingly contributes to this issue you mentioned the housing market and affordable housing but the reality is that for most Americans uh the uh their main source of wealth is whatever Equity they have in a home they they've purchased over the end up pay a mortgage on over the years but increasingly we've seen these private Equity firms come in especially after the housing crash of 2008 and buy up all of this housing and so now we have this unusual situation of private Equity having a an enormous uh a say over affordability and housing in the United States what can be done about that I think one thing that can be done is for us to get serious about expanding homeownership opportunity for first-time homeowners and for Working Families you know last year 27 percent of homes sold in America for were for under a hundred thousand dollars affordable homes but only 23 percent of those were financed with a mortgage you know the rest were kind of bought up in cash by landlords or real estate speculators so so what's going on and the thing that's happening is that many banks just aren't interested in these small dollar mortgages and it's not because those small dollar mortgages are riskier they're just less profitable so if I'm a bank I have an incentive to give you a mortgage on a five million dollar home but I'm not really interested in funding that 75 000 home so this is where the government could step in it could help down payment assistance and ensure those kind of mortgages in a different way to incentivize that low income families have that opportunity to step into homeownership you know I remember meeting a woman named lakia Higby in Cleveland a few years ago and she was renting a four bedroom home for 950 a month but if she bought that home under conventional mortgage standards her mortgage payment and insurance would be about 570 a month that'd be four thousand five hundred dollars more in her pocket every year that's real money and without rent hikes and so I think that's one way we can kind of step in and make sure those homes go to more people and not just to go to private equity Matthew Desmond you talk about labor unions promoting worker and POV and worker empowerment which ultimately Works to fight poverty and you say also that poverty is so expensive you have this beautiful quote of James Baldwin anyone who's ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor put those two together exploitation of the poor you know you learn that every year overdraft fees uh pull about 11 billion dollars a year in fees only nine percent of Bank customers pay most of those fees who are those nine percent they're the poor made to pay for their poverty and if you add that up to the 1.6 billion dollars in check cashing fees and almost 11 billion dollars in Payday loan fees you learn that every day every single day uh 61 million dollars in fees are pulled from the pockets of the poor so when Baldwin wrote that he couldn't even imagine these receipts so this is one way that we need to address poverty because poverty isn't just a lack of income it's a lack of choice and we need to expand the choices folks have in terms of where to work uh where to live and how to access money and credit and the issue of unions fighting poverty so unions have an incredibly impressive track record in striving for worker empowerment the problem in America today is organizing a workplace is incredibly difficult and so let's make it easier so one idea in the book is something called sectorial bargaining which is pretty wonky name but the idea is pretty simple instead of organizing one Starbucks then this Starbucks and another Starbucks what if everyone in food and beverage in America every single worker took a vote and if that vote cleared fifty percent sixty percent whatever we'd like it would activate the Secretary of Labor who would form a bargaining panel made up of worker and business Representatives who could come to an agreement for unions or protective rights that would protect all folks in that industry every single Barista every single star we have five seconds so I think unions and worker power is essential to ending poverty in America Matthew Desmond we thank you so much for being with us and you for your book poverty by America I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023