Poor Americans seem so perplexing to rich Americans because they live in different worlds.
We have two housing and two banking systems. We ask why don’t poor people make different choices but the whole point is they don’t have other choices.
“The system isn’t broken. It’s bifurcated,” writes journalist Matthew Desmond in his 2023 book Poverty, By America. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- The author says the United States has the most poverty of rich countries: (do we?)
- Poverty abolitionists
- The poverty thresholds were originally developed in 1963-1964 by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration.
- Layli Long Soldier small incomes are just “the oil on the surface” of poverty
- “There is plenty of poverty above the poverty line”
- Angus Deaton; 5.8m Americans are absolutely poor by global standards
- Vesla Weaver: those stopped by police are less likely to vote
- Misery is poverty felt morally: Eugene buret
- “It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke”
- Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan: “bandwidth tax” of poverty
- “Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies.”
- Author does this weird thing where only Black and Hispanic poverty vs white without ever mentioning Asian Americans
- Karl Marx’s “law of increasing misery” didn’t exactly prove true as we had material progress. George Orwell said what kept coal miners going during the interwar years rather than striking was cheap sweets and electricity that made radio and movies available to the masses
- But “you can’t eat a cell phone”
- Michael Harrington: “ it is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently, housed, fed, or doctored.”
- Federal spending on poverty has grown, but what little real or sustained progress?
- TANF funding is redirected by states to barely adjacent programs (Brett Favre in Mississippi; anti abortion programs in PA), and many states simply don’t use all the dollars
- Half of America’s foreign born live in California, Texas and Florida
- Marriage is a luxury good. It’s like a home, it doesn’t create wealth it secures wealth
- New hope program in Milwaukee: those who got benefits were later more likely to get married later
- Mass incarceration is anti family
- SSI checks can be docked if family like father of children live in house; food stamps are more if parents apply separately than together
- Jennifer Richeson: “ratchet that turns in only one direction,” is a false way to consider racial progress
- Eric Posner Radical Markets: “We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality,“ they wrote, “we got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.”
- Why did the US have a surge of income inequality that Canada, Belgium and Italy didn’t? They have unions but the US doesn’t?
- Gerald Davies: our grandparents had careers, our parents had jobs and we have tasks.
- Are unions the big answer? (Personally I doubt any entrenched power)
- Rise of staffing and temp work across industries
- EITC program subsidizes corporate workers like Walmart
- Rent rises aren’t only about housing stock he argues but landlords being landlords
- Author worked with Nathan Wilmers to analyze detailed rental housing finance survey from census: landlord profit after regular expenses: $300 per month per unit on average in poor neighborhoods; $225 in middle class and $250 in rich neighborhoods; even when pricing in nonpayment and higher one time expenses, $100 a month from poor units and $50 from rich (this isn’t true in highest cost cities like NYC but in lower cost it is)
- Janes Baldwin: expensive to be poor
- Race for Profit book Keeanga Yamahtta “predatory inclusion” when poor people included under bad terms
- Grapes of Wrath: orders from the east
- “The system isn’t broken. It’s bifurcated,” we have two housing and two banking systems. It’s why the poor seem so perplexing to many of us. We think why don’t they make other choices but the whole point is they don’t have other choices
- 2019 Philly Fed report: increase minimum wage gains typically eroded by landlords raising rents
- Extra unemployment didn’t keep people from working
- Author argues capitalists identify against dependency on government for dependency on capitalists instead
- Mortgage interest deduction and subsidized 529, retirement and employer healthcare plans are all governments welfare for rich families
- The rich get more in government subsidy
- “Poverty wages allow rock-bottom prices”
- Roman historian Sallust writes in Bellum Catilinae in 63BC and John Kenneth Galbraith in 1958 The Affluent society speak about rich people relying less on services and do divesting from them
- “The rich, and the poor soon unite in their animosity toward public goods – the rich because they were made to pay for things they don’t need, and the poor because what they need has become shabby in broken.”
- “There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers.”
- Private opulence and public squalor
- Personal incomes grew by 317% but federal revenue by 252%
- “As our incomes have grown, we’ve chosen to spend more on personal consumption and less on public works. Our vacations are more lavish, but school teachers must now buy their own school supplies.”
- The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981
- Cities that had more Black population gains in Great Migration erected more segregationist policies and became more liberal
- “We prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty”
- How do we keep people poor? We exploit them (buy cheap stuff); subsidize affluence (mortgage interest); and create exclusive communities
- Lots of poverty programs go unfulfilled but mortgage interest deductions don’t. Which is more likely an example of people abusing a system
- Switching to Frutiger font boosted welfare uses
- Why does it matter if rich people will avoid tax strategies? Why not keep trying?
- Emergency Rental Assistance program during pandemic worked but Biden administration got no praise (only criticism of their initial rollout), so they learned it wasn’t worth it
- “The Democratic Party [is] incessantly blamed for having a ‘messaging problem’ when perhaps the matter is that liberals have a despondency problem: fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair “
- “When we refused to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does”
- 10 years after the first LBJ Great society Programs were rolled out in 1964 the share of Americans living in poverty was half of what it was in 1960
- But last 50 years we haven’t progressed on poverty because rents grow faster than incomes and poverty aid (even though we spend double as much). We’re chasing our tail not eradicating
- Sectoral power highlighted in 2020 Clean Slate for Worker Power
- C Wright Mills: structural immorality
- Integration helps: busing was fought, so we tried moving whole families and then we tried opportunity zones;
- affordable housing in more places
- Nietzsche wrote “one must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul “
- George Romney as Nixon’s HUD secretary got kicked out in part because of his concept of withholding federal funds for towns that upheld exclusionary zoning (which author says is still a strong concept, to encourage subsidized housing. If towns don’t want that, then they don’t need federal dollars)
- Alexis de Tocqueville acknowledged that Americans didn’t care about politics until the government wanted to create a road through their property
- Robin Wall Kimmerer: “ I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share”
