A nation of Scrooges
Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, is the author of “Poverty, by America” and “Evicted” recalls that when abroad he’s heard heard the phrase “American-style deprivation” on several occasions. “Anyone who has visited [peer] countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay.”
“The United States has a poverty problem,” Desmond explains. It is a tragedy and a national shame (New York Times):
A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to at minimum double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.
Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.
Not that Americans see their country for what it is.
Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. Between 2001 and 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life, while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.
But as a nation of puffed-up rugged individualists, it does not. We could fix this, Desmond argues. But we do not, in a selfish and “a breathtaking failure of moral imagination.”
Just collecting taxes that the top 1 percent evades “— not raising their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion — would add $175 billion a year to the public purse.” That’s enough to almost eliminate poverty in this country, Desmond argues.
Poverty persists in America because many of us benefit from it. We enjoy cheap goods and services and plump returns on our investments, even as they often require a kind of human sacrifice in the form of worker maltreatment. We defend lavish tax breaks that accrue to wealthy Americans, starving antipoverty initiatives. And we build and defend exclusive communities, shutting out the poor and forcing them to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.
Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.
Well. Any nation that sits on its hands and offers nought but thoughts and prayers in the wake of daily slaughter does not know the meaning of public virtue, much less have any use for it.
We could raise the national minimum wage. We might “attack labor exploitation head-on” and support collective bargaining and more, Desmond suggests.
But no.
We elect a “deeply wounded narcissist” to the White House, strip refugee children from their parents (and then lose them), and bail out the poor financial choices of bankers and investors. But help wipe away our national shame? That’s a bridge too far for a nation drunk on its own nationalist kool-aid, I say.
Desmond argues for a new movement to eliminate poverty in this wealthiest of nations:
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so — the will, not to reduce poverty, but to end it.
“What, are there no workhouses?” ask even the lowest of would-be Scrooges, themselves victims of the system they tolerate.