Poverty, By America
A review of “Poverty, By America” by Matthew Desmond.
Throughout the book, Desmond is able to immerse the reader into the various facets of poverty. He begins by painting a vivid picture of what it’s like to live as in poverty. How current government programs are lacking, and how just how difficult it is to escape poverty. Through his touching stories, Desmond is able to dispel the prevaling idea that government programs for the poor are a waste of tax dollars. While it’s certainly difficult to generalize behavior across a whole class of people, Desmond is able to humanize people experiencing financial hardship, and bring empathy to the reader. I was personally able to understand and feel for the experiences described in the book, and how being poor isn’t indicative of how hard working someone is.
The following quotes help describe what poverty is, and how it affects millions of Americans:
Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. It shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor - an overdue gas bill, a lost job - at the expense of everything else. [Page 21]
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. 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. [Page 23]
Desmond then goes on to demonstrate how there’s an entire ecosystem in place that takes advantage of poor people. From payday loans with incredibly high fees and high interests, to banks generating millions of dollars from overdraft fees. Landlords are also quick to raise rents and extract as much as possible from poor tenants, which makes it hard for them to gain stability and seek better opportunities. Desmond also explains that poor people do not think about moving in the same way as others. While most move to pursue better opportunities and live in more expensive neighborhoods, poor people often move as a last resort, when they get evicted or are forced to move for other reasons.
Desmond also showcases the history of segregation in America, and how its translated to the current poverty crisis. Poor neighborhoods have inherently less opportunities and more dangerous, which affects future generations and perpetuates a cycle of poverty. It’s also not hard to believe that there’s strong push back in having affordable housing in desirable neighborhoods, which keeps certain neighborhoods poor.
The book also showcases how many well-off Americans take advantage of government welfares through programs like the Mortage Interest Deduction (MID), effectively reducing their tax burdens. The MID is an incredibly expensive government program and only benefits those who don’t take the standard deduction. However, most of us don’t consider tax breaks as a government subsidy, but rather that we simply get to keep more of what is “rightfully ours”. Desmond shows that poor people might also be paying more in taxes in general.
With respect to the federal income tax, some believe that middle-class taxpayerse are carrying the poor on their backs. But let’s look at the data. In 2018, the average middle-class family had an income of $63,900, paid $9,900 in federal taxes after all deductions, and received $13,600 in social insurance benefits (like disability and unemployement) along with $3,400 from means-tested programs (like Medicaid and food stamps). In other words, the average middle-class family received $7,100 more in government aid than it paid in federal taxes, a serious return on investment. The claim that middle-class Americans are subsidizing the poor wiht their tax dollars and receiving nothing in return just isn’t true. [Page 98-99]
Overall, Desmond was able to just how misunderstood the poverty issue is, and how it relates to all of us. However, with all that being said, throughout the whole book, I could not shake the feeling that facts and data points were being stretched and presented in ways to fit an agenda, rather than objective metrics. This ultimately creates doubts in the integrity of the arguments Desmond presents and detracts from its saliency. Towards the end of the book, Desmond also seems to present the fight against poverty, or “poverty abolition” as a clearly superior choice, and that those who don’t partake are morally wrong. While I can understand the impact and importance of the issue, it seems unreasonable to alienate those who aren’t onboard with everything he prescribes. He ends the book with the following:
We must ask ourselves - and then ask our community organizations, our employers, our places of worship, our schools, our political parties, our courts, our towns, our families: What are we doing to divest from poverty? Every person, every company, every institution has a role in ameliorating it. The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for. Because poverty is the dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential. It is a misery and a national disgrace, one that belies any claim to greatness. The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it.
We don’t need to outsmart this problem. We need to outhate it. [Page 189]
While that was most likely intended to be a passionate and optimistic call to action, I personally felt that it could be counterproductive to force the issue and “demand” action from everyone, especially when you consider the potential negative consequences that these actions would have on some of us. As unfortunate as it might be, the world has a miriad of “basic needs” that should be improved, and a moral imperative might not be sufficient to compel us to be “poverty abolitionists”.
Overall, I enjoyed reading the book, it was relatively quick, and very educational. I would recommend others to read it.