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The Preamble
Poverty In America with Matthew Desmond
00:53:11
Sharon talks with Princeton Sociologist Matthew Desmond to examine why poverty endures in America, and how reframing the way we see it could lead to real change.
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- [00:01]
Sharon McMahon
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- [02:23]
Matthew Desmond
My guest has written a very, very.
- [02:26]
Guest
Thought provoking book and this covers a.
- [02:28]
Matthew Desmond
Topic that I have discussed so many times. But he brings a perspective to bear that I think is really worth considering.
- [02:36]
Sharon McMahon
His name is Matthew Desmond and the.
- [02:38]
Matthew Desmond
Book is Poverty by America.
- [02:42]
Sharon McMahon
So let's dive in.
- [02:43]
I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.
- [02:49]
Guest
I am very excited to be chatting with Matthew Desmond today. Thank you so much for being here.
- [02:54]
Sharon McMahon
Thanks Sharon, for having me.
- [02:55]
Guest
Your book was so Interesting. And so eye opening. And I learned so much about the topic of poverty in the United States. We all know it's a problem. It's not a mystery that it exists or we all know that it is an issue. But even as somebody who's well aware of many of the issues related to poverty, I still had my eyes opened in so many ways reading this. And I love to start by talking about what is uniquely American about this problem of poverty. How is poverty in the United States different than it is from other places in the world?
- [03:33]
Sharon McMahon
There's way more of it here than in other advanced democracies. So about 30 million people in America live below the official poverty line. So if all those folks got together and founded a country, that country would be bigger than, like, Australia. Just a huge number of folks. Our poverty rates are not just higher, they're much, much higher than other rich democracies. So our child poverty rate, for example, the share of kids living below the poverty line in the United States is double what it is in South Korea or Germany or Canada. So we're kind of like in this disgrace class all our own when it comes to the level of poverty we tolerate amongst such abundance. And I think that's the second thing that sets us apart. Right. There are countries that are much poorer than we are, a lot of them. Right. But we are this incredibly abundant, rich country with extremely high levels of poverty, and that's what makes America different.
- [04:29]
Guest
Yeah, it would be one thing if this was a developing nation and there was widespread, like a vast majority of people were experiencing poverty. But the juxtaposition of the richest people in the world with a million homeless children is what makes this problem that you describe uniquely American. And one of the things you talk about in your book is how you really tried to get close to poverty when you were studying it. You're studying it as a grad student, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your experiences moving to neighborhoods and locations that were experiencing poverty. What was that like for you?
- [05:12]
Sharon McMahon
So I grew up poor in a little town in Arizona. Our family got our gas shut off. You know, often we lost our home to foreclosure. And I think that those experiences shaped me, pressured me, gave me the realization that poverty diminished and stressed my family in ways that felt unfair and deeply personal in a way. And I think that that carried me to kind of ask this question that I've been asking all my adult life, which is like, why is there so much poverty in America? And what can we do to End it. But I think if you're asking those questions, you really do have to get close to folks that are experiencing deprivation. And so for my last book, which was on the housing crisis and eviction, I moved into two very poor neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I lived in a mobile home park, and I lived in a rooming house on the inner city of Milwaukee. And I follow families getting evicted. That's when I saw a level of poverty and a depth of poverty that I'd never seen before or experienced before. I saw kids getting evicted routinely. I met grandmas living without heat in the winter, just huddled below blankets and praying that the space heaters didn't give out. I saw bathtubs backed up with sewage, even though people were paying most of what they had to the rent. And so I think that level of deprivation was something that really drove me, with this book, too, to ask why there's that kind of suffering amongst this land of dollars.
- [06:40]
Guest
I found it really interesting to learn about how the poverty line, which we hear about in the United States. Oh, you live below the poverty line. I found it interesting to learn about how that is calculated. Can you share with everybody? Because I don't know that everyone knows how we arrive at that number.
- [06:58]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah, let's get into the weeds, teacher to teacher. Okay, we'll kind of like give the blackboard a little bit. So Lyndon Johnson launches the war on poverty in 1964, but we have no way to measure poverty. So suddenly the Johnson industry is like, well, how do we know if we won the war at all? How do we know if we made a diff. And so there was an economist, her name was Molly Oshansky. She's working at Social Security Administration. She's like, all right, if poverty is the lack of basic necessities and nothing's more basic than food, then what you can do, you can calculate if someone's poor if they're dedicating over a third of their income to kind of a very bare bones, basic food budget. If you're dedicating more than that, you can't afford housing or medical care or clothing. And so she crunched the numbers and the Johnson administration ran with it. And that's actually still our poverty line, adjusted for inflation every year. Now, that means that about, you know, if you're living in a family of four, making under about $27,000 a year, you're officially considered poor. If you're a single person, it's about $13,000 a year. I don't think anyone listening would agree that that's too high? No, I think many of us would be like, that's much too low. You know what I mean? I agree.
- [08:03]
Guest
Yeah.
- [08:04]
Sharon McMahon
And so that's a big criticism of the poverty line, that even though it captures millions and millions of people, it's probably still too low. There's plenty of poverty above the poverty line. There's also other ways of measuring poverty, and it's. We should approach this question with a lot of humility. Scholars disagree on how to measure poverty, but if you look at just plain old measures of hardship that everyone can get their hands around, there's some pretty troubling signs on the horizon. So the number of eviction filings has increased about 20% over the last 20 years. For example, the share of families visiting food pantries has increased 19% during that time. Now since the Great Recession, the number of homeless school kids has increased 74%. So no matter how we define poverty or draw that line, I think all of us could say that's not right. We're going in the wrong direction if we see those kind of signs on the horizon.
- [08:56]
Guest
Because when you think about the numbers that you just mentioned that are, you know, our official poverty line, if you make $27,000 and you have four kids, you know, I think about just how much it costs to live anywhere to like, have even the most rudimentary of housing, let alone safe housing, let alone housing that's not full of mold. If all you're considering is the, you know, how much would it cost to have a bare bones diet for the four of you that doesn't leave any wiggle room for, yeah, but my child has celiac disease or yeah, but I live in a really high cost of living area or all of these things that it doesn't seem like it's anywhere near an adequate or accurate representation of the number of people who are truly experiencing at least some symptoms of poverty in the United states.
- [09:47]
Sharon McMahon
Exactly. So one in three of us live in homes making $55,000 or less. And, and you know, many of those folks aren't considered officially poor. But what else do you call trying to raise two kids in Miami on 50k a year? That's nothing close to economic security. And so the country does have a giant number of its citizens and folks within its borders just living under real financial straits. And it also harbors this real hard bottom layer of poverty, too, a kind of poverty that we thought only existed over there. Economists have estimated that over 5 million Americans are getting by on $4 a day or less, and they're abjectly poor by global standards. And I think that's a fact that the country just has to face. You know, for many of us, the American story, it really works. You know, we found security, we found stability, we found promise. Maybe we've moved much further than our parents were, but for a lot of us, that promise is not delivering. And I think that the conceit of the book or the challenges of the book is not just to write a book about A Tale of Two cities, right, how some have it worse than others, but really to try to get us to think how our security sometimes is really connected, often to other people's deprivation and poverty. How many of us are unwittingly contributing to all this poverty in our country?
- [11:16]
Guest
The first chapter of the book really lays out exactly what poverty is. And it's not just about numbers and like, oh, you have to make this income. It's about how poverty is traumatic. Poverty is painful. Poverty provides instability. Poverty means fear for people. It means resentment towards the government. It means a loss of liberty. It's far more than just, I don't have enough money to get the things I want. And I found that very eye opening that, you know, when you laid it out the way that you did, you could see exactly all of the ways in which poverty permeates every aspect of somebody's life. And you also mentioned how so many victims of violence in the United States. States are also people who live in poverty. And I wonder if you could expound on that a little bit, because violence touches all of us. We all want to live in safe and prosperous communities. Can you talk a little bit more about how poverty and violence are so intertwined with each other?
- [12:30]
Sharon McMahon
So if you look at the poverty rate over time, you know, it'll go up and down, and you look at the violent crime rate, they don't track the same. And that actually makes sense when you study the data, because the correlation between violence and poverty isn't just about being poor, experiencing poverty. It's living in areas of extreme concentrated disadvantage. These are neighborhoods where you're poor, your neighbor's poor, your neighbor neighbors are poor. These are areas where the jobs have left, where the housing is crumbling, where the state has disinvested. These are neighborhoods that can experience this interesting combination, either police violence and overcorrection or kind of an abandonment by the state. And those are the sociological conditions that really foster and ferment violence in America. You know, most folks that commit violence have been victims of violence. And I think that often for folks that are growing up in incredibly dire straits. And these conditions of correlated adversity, right where like you said, poverty is pain on top of tooth rot, on top of eviction, on top of homelessness, on and on it goes. Many of those folks have either experienced or witnessed violence at a very young age. And some of those go on to commit violence themselves or be victimized by violence under those circumstances. I think that in America, a lot of times when we watch shows about violence, there's a bad guy that does violence. But I think that in the real world, violence is created in the environment, which means if we want to really get our hands around this problem, if we want a safer country, we need a country that really attacks poverty at the root.
- [14:14]
Guest
Yeah. This paragraph in your book where you say poverty is often material scarcity, piled on chronic pain, piled on incarceration, piled on depression, piled on addiction, on and on it goes. Poverty isn't a line you. It's a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about. Crime, health, education, housing. And its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world. And I mean, like, that just perfectly illustrates the complexity and the breadth and the depth of this issue. So let's talk a little bit about why we know it's a problem we've identified that is a big problem in the United States. I don't think anybody listening to this wants their neighbors to be poor. I don't think anybody listening to this wants children to be homeless. I don't think anybody listening to this wants somebody to have no access to a dentist or to not be able to see a doctor when they're sick, but they feel a little bit powerless to do anything about it. And in order to do something about it, you have to understand what's causing it. So walk us through it. What is causing these prolonged systemic issues with poverty in the United States?
- [15:44]
Sharon McMahon
There is a one word answer, and that answer is us. And for a long time, the poverty debate is about them. It's been about the poor themselves. It's been about their behaviors, their lack of education, their work ethic. But I think that if we really want to get at the root causes of poverty in America, we have to look at us. And by us, I mean the financially secure. You know, there's this line in the book that I quote from the novelist Tommy Orange, where he writes, it's like 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 kind of took my breath away. Cause I was like, gosh, that's like the American poverty bait. For over a hundred years, we focused on the poor, the jumpers. You know, we should have been focusing on the fire who lit it. How are we part of this? So many of us consume the cheap goods and services, the working, poor producers, many of us are invested in the stock market. Don't we benefit when we see our returns going up, even when those returns mean someone doesn't get paid a living wage? We are the shareholder capitalist, the half of the country that's invested in the stock market. We protect our tax breaks. The country spends $1.8 trillion on tax breaks. Most of those go to the top 20% of Americans. That's double what we spend on the military, for example. And then we have the audacity to say that the country can't afford to do more when the answer for how we can afford it is staring us straight in the face. Many of us who have found security took less from the government. And then we continue to build segregated communities. We continue to repeat the sins of our fathers and mothers and our grandfathers and grandmothers by hoarding opportunity behind walls, by building neighborhoods of concentrated wealth. But guess what? Those create other kinds of neighborhoods. They create neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which is the side effect of our stockpiled opportunity. So there is so much poverty here, not in spite of our wealth, but because of it.
- [18:06]
Matthew Desmond
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- [19:17]
Adam Scott
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- [19:47]
Matthew Desmond
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- [20:47]
Guest
What if somebody is listening to this and they just are? Like, I'm a teacher at a school, I answer the phone at a insurance office, I'm taking people's X rays to the hospital. Like, I don't live in one of those neighborhoods of stockpiled opportunity. I just live in my normal house in my normal neighborhood and I just buy what I can afford for my kids and I just try to make tomorrow a little better than yesterday. You know. Like I feel like that represents a huge section of Americans who are, you know, middle class, maybe lower middle class, who are just kind of living paycheck to paycheck and they don't view themselves. And in fact they are not America's wealthy. What about people like them, right?
- [21:35]
Sharon McMahon
They are not the main part of this story that I'm telling, you know. So if you are out there cutting coupons, if you are have a few hundred dollars in the bank for savings, if you are not taking big tax breaks, if you are unable to access homeownership, but make too much money to qualify for public housing. If you're in that middle, I'm not talking about you, but there's a lot more folks that claim that identity than actually are part of that group, you know, so the median household income in America is about $60,000. Okay? That's the middle. And so there's a lot of folks making double, triple, quadruple that that are still feeling pinched in a way. Wherever we are, though, on the spectrum, wherever we are on the economic ladder, we can commit ourselves to becoming poverty abolitionists, to unwinding and divesting from poverty. Those who have amassed the most wealth and power deserve the most blame for the situation. They do. But we also can't let ourselves off the hook by just accepting that fact or putting it at their feet entirely.
- [22:50]
Guest
We can't just, as normal Americans, be like, well, he's the problem, right?
- [22:55]
Sharon McMahon
I think that if we want higher taxes on the super rich, those of us who are in the top 20, 15% of the income distribution, maybe we need to start talking about how our tax breaks are also part of this problem. Let's talk really specifically about one tax break, just to kind of get in there. So the mortgage interest deduction. This is an entitlement. Anyone with a home can deduct the cost of their mortgage from their tax bill. Now, that costs the government about $193 billion a year. We spend about $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy. So that's like public housing reducing vouchers. Everything we do to try to help poor families face the housing crisis, that is far, far, far less than the amount we spend as a nation just supporting homeowners that don't need the support. Because most of the mortgage interest deduction just goes to the top 20% of income earners. These are the kind of tax breaks that I think many of us should take a hard look at. And I get it. Viewing a tax break like a housing voucher, it's weird, right? And many of us are like, wait a minute, that's not. That's not. Apples to apples. But I don't know, let's think about it for a second. Our tax break cost the government money. Our tax breaks puts money in my pocket. So if I'm a homeowner, I could get my mortgage interest deduction by deducting it for my taxes, or the government can just mail me the check for that amount of savings every year. It's the same difference. And so Once you think about it like that, then I think we need to consider how our welfare state is incredibly imbalanced, how we do a lot more to guard fortunes than to fight poverty, and how correcting that imbalance is deeply connected to ending poverty in our country.
- [24:44]
Guest
Yeah, you talk about in the book, and I wanted to get more into this about how much welfare the well off actually get. And we think of, you know, welfare as like getting an EBT card or you know, getting a check in the mail where that, you know, money to help pay for, to raise your kids is. We think about it in terms of like a cash payment, but you define it as way more than that. And your example of mortgage interest deductions is just one of, you know, the many possible examples in what other ways are just a general well off American getting welfare from the government.
- [25:24]
Sharon McMahon
We often deduct the savings for college savings, for example, 529 plans. It's kind of a part of like upper middle class, upper class Americans normal life. We're saving for college for our kids. Big savings, big deduction you get if you use that savings for educational purposes. But only the upper class of Americans can really afford 529 plans. It's really a benefit for the most privileged families in the country. If we get our health insurance or our jobs, that doesn't count to our income. That's a big tax break that costs the country like $300 billion a year in savings. Many wealth transfers are part of the known story about capital gains tax deductions, for example. So if you dig into the data like I did and you look at everything the government does for us, every tax break, every social insurance program, things like Social Security and every means tested program, these are programs directed to our poorest families, things like food stamps and housing vouchers. And if you add all that up, the average family in the bottom 20% of the income distribution receives about $26,000 a year from the government. And the average family in the top 20% receives about $35,000 a year from the government. That's a lot more. That's almost a 40% difference. And so that's what I'm talking about, about this imbalanced welfare state, right? We're given the most the families that have plenty already. And then we repeat this lie that the richest country in the world can't afford to do more. But we could if just many of us took less from the government, if we did a lot more to help the families that need it the most instead of Doing a lot more to guard people's fortunes.
- [27:10]
Guest
I think when you view it the way that you just discussed it, that a tax break is, if you just thought about it in the sense of like, well, we view it as like, I'm just putting a minus 8,000 on my tax return. But if you think about it from the perspective of the government sending you a check for 8,000, most people, if you were like, should Matthew get an $8,000 check from the government this year because he bought a nice house and they want to be like, good job, good job on homeownership, here's 8K. Most of us would be like, heck no, he doesn't need an $8,000 check. Look at the nice house he just bought. When you think about it from that perspective of should we distribute checks? Most people would say no. I think if you ask people, should we just send out $8,000 checks, $10,000 checks, whatever, to people who are well off, people would say, no, that's ridiculous. Of course not. But you're saying that's what we're doing when we are allowing people to take these huge tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the well off.
- [28:22]
Sharon McMahon
Right. I love that. It's like you were a teacher or something, you know, and so, yeah, that's, that's exactly how I need to think about it. And you know, the way we do taxes in America, it's almost psychologically primed us not to think about it like that. Because what we do think about is the check we have to write, right? We think about that check. And so then when we run into our coworker, our neighbor at a barbecue, the way we talk about taxes, like, man, taxes sucks, man, I got, oof, I got hit with taxes this year. But we don't think about all the ways the government is benefiting us and propping us up during that. And a lot of times when the tax conversation comes up, folks will say the rich pay more taxes. And they do because they have more money. But that's not the same thing as paying a higher share of taxes. Our income tax is progressive, so the more money you make, the higher percentage of it has to go to taxes. But other taxes are regressive, especially sales tax and other kinds of tax. And economists have actually figured out, if you add up all the taxes, the country kind of has a flat tax rate. The poor pay about 26% of their income to taxes. The rich pay about 26, 28%. The richest among us, like the richest 400 families, they actually have the lowest tax burden. And so I think that the idea of there's these kind of non tax paying class is unfair. It's like only counting calories by what you eat for breakfast. If you add all the taxes up, then you kind of see where we all get a penny in. And so I think that we do need to start thinking about tax benefits as government welfare wealth fair, if you will. And the result of this, the implication of this is that we have less money to fight poverty, we have less money to fight the affordable housing crisis. And if we didn't have an affordable housing crisis, an eviction crisis, over a million homeless kids, if we didn't have families struggling to meet food budgets every year, maybe I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over the fact that homeowners are going to benefit, for example. But that's not the country we live in. And so if we want to get serious about ending poverty and bringing about a freer, safer, more thriving country, I think we have to get serious about many of us taking less help from the government. And I think that this is one of the key ways that we have to recenter the conversation. And again, it's not just about the super rich. It is, but it's not just about them. And from a personal standpoint, I think it calls us who might benefit from something like a mortgage interest deduction or a 529 deduction to really start talking about our taxes differently. So the next time tax season rolls around and someone's like, taxes, maybe those of us who are homeowners could be like, I know I got this insane benefit called the mortgage interest deduction. It saved me like $10,000 this year. It does nothing to encourage me to buy a home. It just makes my home more expensive than it should be. And you know what? There's an eviction crisis. So I've donated that money to my local eviction defense fund and I've written my congressperson saying, let's scale back this benefit for folks like me. Now that's an awkward conversation, but that's kind of how we change the common sense in America around these things that many of us just take for granted. And I think that in the least, if this is the way we want to organize our country, we have to own up to it. And we can't keep repeating this dishonesty that a country this wealthy cannot afford to do more. I know we've been talking about spreading the responsibility around, but I just can't get over this one study I saw that showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed, paid more tax, just stopped evading taxes so successfully that we as a nation could raise an additional $175 billion a year, that is enough to double our investment in affordable housing and still have money left over. It is enough to reestablish the child tax credit in Covid that reduced child poverty by 46% in six months. $175 billion is almost enough to lift everyone above the official poverty line that's under it. So, like, we have the resources, we just need to invest in rebalancing our safety net and reinvesting in the public welfare instead of in private wealth.
- [33:03]
Guest
What kind of investments would it take? Are you proposing that we build more public housing? Are you proposing that we make college free? Are you proposing that we expand? Who's eligible for, let's say, food stamp programs or free lunch at school? What exactly would you propose as some of the programs that would be needed if we were going to invest? What do you think would make the biggest difference?
- [33:33]
Sharon McMahon
So I want to end poverty in America. I don't want to reduce it. I want to abolish it. And I think we need to do three things to do that. The first is we need to deepen our investments in fighting poverty. There are several ways to do this. I think through affordable housing avenues is a clear first step in addressing the fact that, you know, most poor renting families today give at least half of their income to housing costs. About one in four of those families spent over 70% of their income just on rent and utilities. That is a crisis. We need to address problems like that through deeper investments in fighting poverty paid for by fair tax initiatives. But we don't just need deeper investments. We need different ones too. So this means we need to address the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor markets, in the housing markets, in the financial markets. The job market needs to deliver. For the average American worker, wages are stagnating so that if you're a man without a college degree today, for example, you're making less than you did 50 years ago, inflation adjusted. That is wrong. So we need to empower workers. We need to expand people's choice about where they live and how they live. And we have to stop this just constant exploitation of the poor and the money markets. So every single day, over $61 million in fines and fees are pulled from the pockets of the poor by overdraft charges, payday loan charges, and check cashing charges. That needs to stop and that money needs to stay in the pocket of the poor. And then the third move, the third thing that we need to do is finally turn away from segregation. We need to tear down the walls that are surrounding our communities. These walls made up of laws that push anyone that's not above a certain income level out of our communities and really kind of move toward neighborhoods that are inclusive, that are diverse, and that are based on shared prosperity and not opportunity hoarding. And that's how we can end poverty in America. I'm happy to get down to the policy details because there's a ton of policies underneath each of those pillars, but I think Those are the 1, 2, 3 punch for this solution.
- [35:50]
You ever read a headline and feel like it's describing a completely different world than what you just heard five minutes ago? That happened to me last week reading about one of the Supreme Court's latest immigration rulings. One outlet had Supreme Court gives Trump administration green light to deport Illegal Aliens to third party countries while another led with the Supreme Court just co signed one of Trump's most lawless immigration moves. Same story, two totally different, different angles and it made me stop and think what's actually happening here. I found both of those headlines on Ground News. Their app and website let you compare how media is framing any given story worldwide and get context on each source. I really believe in what they're doing, helping people think critically, spot their own biases, spot the biases of various media outlets and understand how the media shapes the same facts in wildly different ways.
- [36:49]
Guest
If that sounds helpful to you, go.
- [36:51]
Sharon McMahon
To Ground News Sharon to follow along on that story. Ground news showed 186 total articles. Clearly major news. Seeing both views side by side changes how you read the news. Plus the blind spot report shows if a story was covered way more by the left or right leaning sources and that imbalance actually matters. Especially if you want a full picture. So go to Ground News Sharon to get 40% off the ground News Vantage plan which will unlock access to all of their news analysis features. Ground News is doing such important work. I hope you'll check them out. That's Ground News Sharon.
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Sharon McMahon
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- [40:29]
Guest
What would you say to people who feel like the government actually does a bad job at everything? And why would we rely on the government to take more of my Money and they're just going to inefficiently misspend it. You know, that's a common sentiment in the United States that the government does a bad job at things. And we think to ourselves, why would I want you to have more of the money that I earned? It's my money. I earned it. Why would I give it to you? What would you say to people who. That is their viewpoint.
- [41:05]
Sharon McMahon
There's no other solution. This is the solution. There's no other mechanism. If charity would be enough, it would be enough. And I wouldn't have to write this book and we wouldn't be having this conversation if the market would be enough. We've just experienced in the last 50 to 70 years a great experiment in that where markets were deregulated and unions were crushed and we were promised economic dynamism and we were promised a big lift out of poverty and desperation, and we got inequality, but the dynamism didn't arrive. And the job market is now failing millions of American workers. Now, the government doesn't do everything perfect. You're right. And you know, I can point to some studies with respect to poverty that shows like, one thing that's crazy about looking at government programs. You know, we hear a lot about welfare dependency. There's not a lot of evidence for it. There is a lot of evidence for us doing a really bad job connecting families to programs that they need and deserve. One in two elderly Americans that could apply for food stamps, don't take them. One in five workers that could get this benefit called their earned income tax Credit. That's a huge benefit, actually lifts millions of families out of poverty every year, don't take it. And that's not about stigma. It's not about people being too proud. That's about government inefficiency at rent tape and bureaucratic hurdles. That is a problem. But when it comes to addressing poverty, the government has a pretty darn good track record. So if you look at the war on poverty 10 years after the War on Poverty was launched, and the War on Poverty is just kind of a catch all term for a bundle of programs that did things like make food aid permanent, expand Social Security, establish government health insurance. Ten years later, the poverty rate was half of what it was when the War on Poverty was launched. That's real progress. Or if you look at Covid, the spinning that happened during COVID was incredibly effective at reducing poverty during a time of economic catastrophe. Now, we talked about the child tax Credit, reducing child poverty by 46% in six months. That's the biggest thing we've done for poor kids in America in half a century. The emergency rental assistance, which was just kind of helping renters who had fallen behind because they lost their jobs, that reduced evictions to the lowest they've ever been on record, just kept evictions low, low, low for months and months and months after the eviction moratorium ended. And so are government programs perfect? Could they be improved? Absolutely. Do they have a proven track record of reducing poverty and lifting families out of desperation? Absolutely. And so I think that we don't have to choose. We can both want better, more efficient, improved government systems, and we can want those systems to make deeper investments so that we can have real progress on poverty, the likes of which we haven't seen in a long, long time.
- [44:12]
Guest
What would you say to somebody who feels like, I'm going to take care of myself and you go ahead and take care of yourself and all of these programs are just Marxist, it's just communism? Because, you know, that's a common sentiment that government programs is just communism.
- [44:30]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah. I think that the normal way of responding to that is to try to get people to see where the government is in their life. And maybe it's to pick fight about what is Marxism, what is not, what is socialism, what is not. But I think most folks that are using the term Marxism and socialism probably haven't read Marx and probably haven't studied socialism. That's a debate response though. You know, that's like a debate. We're having a debate, but I don't really want to have a debate with that person. What I want to try to do is try to convince that person that what I'm asking for is a much better country. It's a country that a lot of us want to get behind. It's a country where you don't have to worry that you're one divorce away, one car accident away from real hardship. It's a country where you can walk down the street of a major American City at 2 o' clock at night and feel okay and feel safe. It's a country where you don't get on the bus and see these faces of the exhausted working poor. It's a country where you're not one of those faces. It's a country that pays people a fair wage. It's a country where you don't have to have that thing in your stomach that you do when you're a parent in America where, you know, like, things go really bad for my kid in this country. And so this is not a country that's calling for sameness and equality. This is not a country that's calling for everyone gets paid the same, everyone wears the same thing. I am envisioning a country where no one falls below a certain economic level. No one. And that's a country that involves a little bit more self investment. And I feel that there were times in this country where we rose to that place more than we are now. If you look at what happened after World War II, for example, and this is a time where one in three Americans belong to a union where jobs are really delivering for a lot of us, that was the most economically equitable time in the country. But I think as workers lost power and as the government kind of divested from deep investments in the public through tax breaks for the rich and for corporations, our country has left a lot of folks behind. I think if you're someone that has economic security and want to be left alone, you're not left alone. For example, the government's supporting you in a lot of different ways. But also, I think no matter where you are, I think you want a safer, more dynamic, freer country. There's this line from this old book called the Book of Sands that says, if you want your people to build a boat, don't gather the team and assemble the wood, but make them long for the edge of the sea. So I think that instead of getting into these debates about socialism or government interference, I'm just trying to get people to long for the edge of the sea a little bit more.
- [47:18]
Guest
It's like I always say, quality schools benefit all of us. Even if you don't have children in school, even if your kids are grown, even if you homeschool, quality schools benefit the community at large. And that's true for a variety of reasons. Better educated population tends to experience less poverty, tends to experience less violence, tends to commit lower levels of violent crime, tends to be more prosperous in a variety of ways, including things like economic innovation and 25 different ways that I could list, in which a community, no matter if your children are attending those schools, benefits from quality public schools. And I think it's possible that the same is true of a variety of other types of programs to end poverty, that it would benefit all of us. Even if we feel like, I'm doing fine, y' all don't need to worry about me. Worry about yourself. Actually worrying about your neighbor benefits you in a variety of ways. And I think if we can think about how we can make the case to people that actually you do benefit by ending poverty. And here are the ways that you benefit rather than just relying on people's benevolence, because benevolence is wonderful and we all hope that people are benevolent, but most people's benevolence has a limit as well. People are inherently self interested. And making the case for why ending poverty benefits you is in your self interest, I think, is perhaps an important component of this discussion that we all benefit from, from ending poverty. And it's not just benevolence.
- [49:16]
Sharon McMahon
There's a tension in the book on this, where one of the tensions, and I think it's a true tension, is that the book is not an everyone wins argument. Right? The book plainly says many of us who have found security and privileged in this country need to change. There needs to be a change. That change can be painful. And if we invest, for example, in solidarity at the poor, our portfolio might take a bit of a hit. If we choose to go to our zoning board meeting on Tuesday nights and stand up and say, no, I want an affordable housing development in this community. I refuse to deny other kids opportunities my kids get by living here. We might ostracize ourselves from our neighbors. These changes are not going to come without sacrifice. But what we get is something better. We do. We get something better. And I think that that's the tension that the book is asking us to embrace, to strive for higher angels. And I think many of us who, even those of us who are very privileged in this country, we can experience that privilege in a way that's stingy, that's frightened, that doesn't feel that it's freedom inducing. And I think that's because this dynamic of public poverty and private opulence which I write about in the book, so you can walk out of your $3 million condo in San Francisco and try to walk down the street to a restaurant, and you're just bombarded often with homelessness and real desperation, poverty that infringes on you and everyone that lives there. If you divest in a public school system like you said, then not only your kids, but all the kids around you are getting less, even though if your family's accumulating more. And so I think that we want to find a healthy balance between rewarding people for work and ideas and ingenuity which should be rewarded and making sure, you know, we are all living in a place where everyone's basic needs are taken care of. And the country can absolutely afford to do that. That's the good news.
- [51:30]
Guest
You have a website that I think a lot of people will be interested to visit because I know that so many people listening to this are going to be like, yeah, but what can I do? You know, like, let's say I'm. I'm like, okay, I like these ideas. I agree with you. Kids shouldn't be homeless. Anybody who thinks kids should be homeless, I'm sorry, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know anyone who's like, it's fine with me. The kids are homeless. No matter your financial status, we can all agree that those are the kinds of conditions that should not exist. Homeless children. No. So let's say somebody's listening to this and they feel like, what can I do? Your website starts by giving some actual practical ideas. Can you tell us just a little bit more about that?
- [52:17]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah, let's go through the ideas real quick because I think that the end of poverty is going to require new policies, require new social movements, but it's also going to require that each one of us become poverty abolitionists. This is a personal project and a political one. This means committing ourselves to this end goal, really having the moral ambition to abolish poverty from these shores and I think making it part of our identity, who we are. Many of us might say, you know, I'm an environmentalist, so I do this specific thing, or, you know, I'm anti racist, so I strive for this. And I think that we can live our lives as poverty abolitionists. So here's just a few concrete things we can do. We can flex our influence wherever we have it. So many of us aren't super powerful people, but we got a little influence somewhere. You know, we might be on a school board, we might belong to, to a corporate board where we're a boss. We can start pressuring wherever we are. Faith Communities, our employer. So I'm a professor at a university. I might start asking, are our landscapers paid fairly? What are we invested in as a university? Second, we can start shopping and investing differently. Many of us know, like, here's my organic grown cucumber, but we don't know how much the farm worker got picking it, you know, and so we can consult groups like B Corp or Union plus to make decisions about shopping with our wallet and supporting companies that do right by their workers. We can talk about taxes differently, like I talked about before, you know, and view them as benefits that we get and benefits that can be questioned and criticized. We could go to those zoning board meetings personally, you know, and start advocating for more housing, especially more affordable housing in our communities, most of us live in segregated communities and those of us who are living in affluent, especially affluent white communities, we're the most segregated group in the country and we need to take some ownership about that. And the last thing we could do is we could join an anti poverty organization. And the good news is there's a ton of them and they're all around the country and they're putting in great work. So if you are interested in doing that, if you're interested in learning more about groups that are fighting the good fight in your state or at the federal level, you can go to this website called endpovertyusa.org so it's just endpovertyusa.org and get connected with your time and your resources.
- [54:48]
Guest
Thank you so much. Really eye opening book. I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed our conversation today.
- [54:53]
Sharon McMahon
Thanks for being here.
- [54:54]
Yeah, no, me too. Thanks for the great question. Appreciate you.
- [54:58]
You can find Matthew Desmond's book Poverty Buy America wherever you buy your books.
- [55:03]
Guest
And you can also Visit the website.
- [55:05]
Sharon McMahon
Endpovertyusa.Org for more information. Thank you so much for listening to here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon, our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Pop Parks and our audio producer is Craig Thompson.
- [55:29]
Guest
We'll see you soon.
- [55:33]
Sharon McMahon
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