Private, public and charity squalor: How the US helps rich and hurts poor

The Rise and Fall of Mayor Lightfoot During the 2010 Peculiar Housing Crisis: The Impact of Economic Insecurity on the Standard of Living

The spread of basic income programs shows the growing distance between Democrats and Republicans, urban voters and rural conservatives, those who want more government in peoples lives and those who want less.

Robert Rector is a conservative public assistance expert who helped shape the welfare changes of the 1990s.

Political leaders in Democratic cities in states that are deep blue and bright red such as Shreveport, La., are moving in the opposite direction. In her tough campaign for re-election, Mayor Lightfoot doesn’t seem to have gained any traction with her rivals for the first round of voting on February 28.

“These are the same people that didn’t want to expand health care, and look at the number of people in their communities, these ruby red communities, that are suffering,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “These are the same people, frankly, that are attacking the very core of our democracy, demonizing being different, being the other, based upon your religion, your creed, who you love, your gender identity.”

Adrian Talbott, associate dean for civic engagement at the Crown Family School of Social Work at the University of Chicago, called the effort “a prime example of Democrats’ assertion that government can work.” He added that the expectation was, “with big bets on behalf of traditionally marginalized, vulnerable populations in light of the pandemic, government can meet this moment.”

The income cutoff for Chicago and Cook County is forgiveness 250 percent of the federal poverty level for an individual, 75,000 for a family of four, though it was adjusted toward certain groups such as homeless people.

A little more than a quarter of the U.S. population lived below the poverty line in 2011. Matthew says that the federal poverty line is not indicative of the full picture of economic insecurity in America.

Growing up in a small town in Arizona, where economic insecurity could impact a family’s stress level, it was clear to me how important it was for a family to have a good standard of living. His family home was foreclosed on and the gas was shut off. He wanted to understand how much poverty could exist within a country as wealthy as the US.

“Most government aid goes to families that need it the least,” Desmond says. “If you add up the amount that the government is dedicating to tax breaks — mortgage interest deduction, wealth transfer tax breaks, tax breaks we get on our retirement accounts, our health insurance, our college savings accounts — you learn that we are doing so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty.”

He hopes that ending poverty in America is a better idea for everyone. It is better for homeless people who are hungry and humiliated. It’s better for us who have found security that’s diminished and depressed due to poverty. I believe there’s quite a lot to be hopeful about.

Between 1964 and ’74, the poverty rate fell by half. The “great society” and the war on poverty made an enormous difference. These are interventions into the lives of the poor in America. They made food aid permanent. Social Security was expanded by them. There were so many elderly Americans dying penniless before the war on poverty and the Great Society. And there was this massive gain in pulling older folks out of poverty. …

And I feel that that should give us a lot of hope, actually, because there’s some of us that say, “Well, government aid doesn’t work. It’s not powerful.” But the Great Society in the war on poverty have this incredibly historical precedent for the good work the government can do.

Congress looked a lot like Congress does now when those programs were rolled out. It was polarized. It was obstructionary. The Southern Democrats were aligning with Republicans to block progressive reform. The reforms were passed even in a situation like that, which looks like Washington today. So why? And I think the reason is — and this is an idea that I borrowed from Julian Zelizer’s fantastic book, The Fierce Urgency of Now — the reason is grassroots organizers, like the civil rights movement and the labor movements in particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers to move their hand. If we want to confront this problem, I think our hope is in the movement.

A system locks in for private opulence and public squalor: How can we afford to live without paying taxes? An example from Galbraith

If we are homeowners, we can deduct the interest of our mortgage from our tax bill. Many of us say that is very different than a housing subsidy or food stamp. But I disagree. Both of those things cost the government money. Those two things drive up the deficit. We have money in our pocket because of those things. So instead of taking the mortgage interest deduction, the government could just mail you a check. That would be the savings you would take. It’s the same thing.

And I guess what really angers me even about this conversation is that a lot of times when we put forward a proposal to stabilize people’s housing situation or cut child poverty in half, we hear over and over and over again, how can we afford it? How can we afford it? And the answer staring us right in the face like we can afford it if many of us took a little less from the government.

When you have a country like ours, where there are millions of poor people living alongside millions of people with considerable means, a system locks in — a system for private opulence and public squalor. And this is an old phrase. It goes back to the Roman time. It was brought out and brought to life by the mid-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his wonderful book.

And it goes a little something like this: If you are a family of means, you have the incentive to rely less and less on the public sector. We used to want to be free of bosses, but now we want to be free of bus drivers. We do not want to go on the bus. We don’t want to enroll our kids in public school frequently. We don’t need to play in the public park or swim in the public pool. We have our own clubs, our own schools. We have our own cars. We have less incentive to spend money on public services as we withdraw into private life.

This one statistic that I calculated just blew me away. A study showed that the top 1% of Americans could raise $175 billion in taxes by just paying the taxes they owe, not paying more taxes. That is just about enough to pull everyone out of poverty, every parent, every child, every grandparent. So we clearly have the resources to do this. It is not hard.

This is a rough estimate. I looked at everyone under the poverty line to arrive at this number and added up the average amount it would take to get over the poverty line. It’s pretty equivalent to what we could earn by just enforcing fair taxes at the very top of the market. What else could we do with $175 billion? We could more than double our investment in affordable housing. We could make sure we give the child tax credit back. [That]was basically a check for middle and low-income families with kids. That’s all it was. There was a 50% reduction in child poverty in six months with the simple intervention. We could bring that back again with $175 billion and still have money left over.

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/21/1164275807/poverty-by-america-matthew-desmond-inequality

Get More People to Apply for Food Stamps: An Intersection with Susan Nyakundi and Heidi Saman (Aug. 2004)

Many of us thought that people applying for food stamps were stigmatized because they were poor. They were embarrassed, and there is something to that. But the weight of the evidence, I think, suggests that the reason people aren’t accessing aid is because it’s confusing [and] hard to apply for. Often you have to apply every year again and again, and people often lose their aid just because they couldn’t make the appointment or forgot to reapply.

There are interventions that address those problems that can see huge returns on the people that they help. It is possible to get many more people applying for the Earned Income Tax Credit if you use less words and make the font bigger. The benefit is designed to help poor families out of poverty. If you can connect elderly people with a person who can walk them through the application process for food stamps, they will most likely be able to get more food security in their years of old. We should place the interventions that will get people connected to aid immediately.

Susan Nyakundi andHeidi Saman produce and edit the audio interview. Audio interview adapted for NPR.org by: Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth.