THE OTHER SIDE: Poverty — American made and American maintained

Jun 14, 2024

There are so many consequences for the rest of us as the few maximize their wealth, as a grievously unfair tax structure enables them to keep far more than they need while proper housing and adequate healthcare is unattainable for so many.

There are the poor. And there are those who study poverty and study the poor, talk about it, write about it, try to understand it. The politicians who pontificate about it.

My parents were born into poverty to Italian and Hungarian immigrants. They grew up in ghetto housing, my mother fostered out at an early age after her mother died, while my father went to work at eight when his father died. They were still poor when they had me. They stubbornly worked their asses off—my father, a factory worker, a union organizer, then working at The Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. He made less than 50 bucks a week because his Stalinist superiors, some of whom turned out to be slumlords, made sure everyone below them worked for peanuts. He finally left the Communist Party when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. After four years of FBI-enforced unemployment, my father found his way to decently paid employment as the night city editor for a New York daily, working from midnight to 8 a.m. My mom worked days as a waitress, stashing leftovers in her extra-large purse, and went to high school and then college at night. Degrees in hand, over the years, she transitioned to teaching in New York City public schools. I did my best by delivering newspapers and working at the Public Library every afternoon after school.

Having lived it, I never had to study poverty or philosophize about it. Of course, I was American poor. Five of us in a three-room apartment with a million roaches. But, as I learned later in life, traveling to places like Mexico and Nicaragua and China, there is poor, and there is really poor. In China, I met folks who could only dream about five people in three rooms. I could never successfully think of myself as poor after that. Much like mental illness and depression, there is a sliding scale to poverty. It sucks even though there are so many others worse off.

The American poor are all around us. One of my first jobs in the Berkshires was working for South Berkshire Community Action starting community gardens and food co-ops. In the rural South Berkshires, our poverty is often hidden behind the doors of houses off the backroads, and wherever you find it, it is masked by fierce pride and the great reluctance to ask for help.

In recent years, I have watched as the word “hunger” was replaced by “food insecurity.” “Insecurity” is easier to ignore. Who in Washington or Boston can imagine a kid turning to his mom and saying, “Mommy, I’m food insecure!” There’s no dressing up hungry children. Decades later, I circled back to tackle hunger volunteering with Jurek Zamoski and Mel Greenberg for Berkshire Bounty, picking up donated food from Big Y and Guido’s and delivering it to People’s Pantry. Mel fed and cooked for the hungry until he couldn’t move and died. I held on until my back was no longer happy lifting 50 pounds of potatoes.

Marcie Setlow, my esteemed publisher at The Berkshire Edge, suggested I read and write about Matthew Desmond’s “Poverty, by America.” Because he began by offering Tolstoy’s wise observation, “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another,” I guessed that Desmond had lived that which he writes.

The son of the pastor of a small-town Arizona church who depended on the offerings of his parishioners, Desmond learned early on about the overwhelming power of money—surely more consequential for those not having it. His father, too, lost a job, and the bank took their home. In college, inequity was all around him: “[W]hat I was seeing all around me, which was money. So much money … My classmates were going out for sushi. I stocked canned sardines and saltine crackers in my dorm room. The town of Tempe, the Phoenix suburb where ASU’s main campus sits, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a two-mile-long artificial lake in the middle of the desert, a giant puddle that loses two-thirds of its water to evaporation each year. A few blocks away, people were begging on the street …”

As more recent vision of our double reality, a Tesla parked beside the homeless in 2022:

I have to hand it to Desmond, he is a very good researcher and writer with the persistence of poverty itself. He has been “stalking” the subject. He moved from the University of Wisconsin to a mobile home community in Milwaukee to better understand the poor and the homeless. And in the spirit of the ’60s, Desmond does indeed tell it like it is: “This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy … Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in that space between poverty and security.”

By the way, my decision to make independent documentary films, the politics of which both pissed people off and often disqualified their appearance on PBS or HBO, makes that $55,000 a year seem like the very top of Mt. Everest to me. An unattainable destination, an impossible dream.

Of that 38 million, there are a million homeless school kids and a couple million who lack running water and are compelled to drink from contaminated streams or travel miles to fill water barrels. One real-life consequence of that poverty: Once-eradicated diseases like hookworm have since reemerged.

Why, Desmond asks, does this happen in an economy that produces trillions more in goods and services than our current rival, China? In an America whose gross domestic product (GDP) is larger than the GDPs of the UK, Germany, France, India, Japan, and Italy combined.

Desmond claims we looking for answers in the wrong place. We won’t find it by looking at those without, but at those with. Certainly, it’s important to see the poor. But as Desmond concludes: Seeing them doesn’t answer why so many are poor. He writes: “To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering?” (Emphasis added.)

It quickly dawned on me that, if you really want to learn about the Holocaust, you’ll learn not by studying the Jews, the Gypsies, the gay people, or the intellectuals and radicals, but by de-coding the Nazis. It wasn’t the victims who brought us the Holocaust but the executioners.

Thanks to Desmond, I began to re-think the unending conversations we seem to be having about affordable housing and all the folks who can no longer afford to live here. We won’t solve the problem of affordable housing in South County by looking at the growing number of folks now priced out of the housing market.

Who sets the prices for housing? Surely not the barista at one of our coffee shops. Certainly not the unseen dishwasher at the restaurants serving fine dining fish for $45 and chicken for $35. But maybe it’s the folks who drive up in their luxury SUVs offering several million in cash to the homeowners for their Alford or New Marlborough homes? How about those building $3 million new homes on hilltops with home entertainment centers that cost more than these same baristas might make in a decade?

Desmond knows there is a consequence to pointing the finger in the right direction: “Ending poverty will require new policies and renewed political movements, to be sure. But it will also require that each of us, in our own way, become poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.”

As I thought about a renewed political movement, I found myself going back to what Karl Marx and Engels were writing about in their 1848 Manifesto—with “personal worth” transformed into “exchange value.” And this which seems to capture our current reality:

“All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones … In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes …

“Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?” (Emphasis added.)

Marx and Engels are, of course, talking about so much more than just money: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” Globalization, with the natural Amazon destroyed, and another artificially conjured Amazon marketplace with its instant gratification. And our climate crisis.

Desmond reminds us that poverty is ever-present, it is everywhere, so often manifested as pain, the bricklayer, cashier, home health-aid, those who make the beds and mop the floors, those exposed to a myriad of chemicals.

In my experience, many with money haven’t a clue what daily life is like for the poor. How could they? The constant lack of choice. Where one lives and isn’t able to, what one wears, how one gets around or doesn’t, what one eats or would like to eat, what kind of healthcare one needs versus what one can avail oneself of. Ask a poor person when he or she—if not in excruciating, unendurable pain—last went to the dentist. To this day, I dread eating out in a group because those with money order with abandon—adding liquor or wine to their meal and, naturally, dessert—then more often than not reach for the bill and suggest we divide the total by the number of those at the table. My friend, Jim, with laser vision, would always manage to find the cheapest item on the menu, whether he liked it or not. For those without, there is never a meal without varying degrees of denial. And, of course, violence.

Desmond offers a small tidbit for us here in the Commonwealth: 40 percent of those ultimately released from prison as a child had witnessed a murder. He is obviously not talking about Alford or Mount Washington.

Desmond reminds us that, while income has remained stagnant and inflation claims an even larger percentage of what we have, rents have soared. Though a very good tenant, I have found myself evicted twice in recent years, first as an affordable apartment in the least desirable part of town was sold to folks who saw it as an opportunity to fix and rent for a lot more, and the second as the last of the affordable apartment buildings in downtown went the way of gentrification. Once an endangered species in Great Barrington, the affordable apartment is now pretty much extinct. Meanwhile, Desmond tells us that one of every four renters spend more than 70 percent of their money on utilities and rent.

Who can ever fully appreciate the reality of the poor worried renter? Putting up with minimal to absent heat in the winter, not a double-paned window in sight, with sweltering heat in the summer, with abominable plumbing or the indefatigable mold—years ago a downstairs neighbor had walls that grew mold faster than summertime zucchini.

The poor know the risk of asking—let alone insisting—that problems be fixed. They are quite aware that a poorly timed request might bring the whole tenuous relationship of marginal affordability crashing down. After all, who wants a needy tenant? There are 3.6 million American evictions each year. Today, owners are acutely aware of the hoards looking for a place to live, imagining someone new would gratefully pay even more.

Yes, it’s about surviving on the margins, and that’s where the emotional wear and tear comes from, what Desmond appreciates as instability. I am so much better off than most but losing your home, whatever faults you find with it, is debilitating and demoralizing. We carelessly use the term “starting over,” but it’s emotionally inaccurate. It is far closer to stumbling over. You’ve lost your footing, there is no longer any reliable ground beneath you. No Scarlet A for Adultery but rather an H for Homeless. I was lucky for, profoundly grateful for friends. But there is increasingly for so many Americans, what Desmond tells us is the fear that doesn’t go away, the sense that things will get worse.

Self-underpaid/employed for decades, I was still woefully unaware such similar fear existed in the job market. Today, 50 percent of jobs are eliminated by year’s end. I had heard the term “gig worker” without fully appreciating the massive numbers of those now regarded as temporary—Lyft-ing and Uber-ing those with more money; packing Amazon orders; or working without union representation or job security in retail, leisure, healthcare, or building trades. Many without benefits or healthcare and with no guarantee that today’s gig means a job tomorrow.

There are several extraordinary myths about low-income workers, work, welfare, unemployment insurance, etc. For years, we have been told about the many just looking for an excuse to take the free lunch and skip the inconvenient reality of working for a living. During COVID, office buildings, universities, restaurants, concert venues, stadiums were shut. To keep the economy on life support, the Federal and State governments provided expanded unemployment insurance, stipends, stimulus checks, rental assistance, expanded Child Tax Credits. Not only did this strategy get us through the worst, but poverty in America dropped precipitously by 16 million—white and of color, urban and rural, young and old. Childhood poverty was cut in half.

But as Desmond reveals, rather than consider this a significant accomplishment, it prompted a severe counterresponse. When workers chose not to rush back to work, it was “the lazy workers” who were blamed. The Chamber of Commerce claimed that 25 percent of American workers were earning more in benefits than they would have been paid. Republican Kevin McCarthy said, “This is what happens when you extend unemployment benefits for too long …”

The Wall Street Journal opined, “Covid Unemployment Relief Makes Help Impossible to Find.” The solution: Stop paying workers to stay home. With less money, fewer choices, more hunger, more pressure to come up with rent, it would push them back to work. Hadn’t that pressured workers into the mills, the slaughter houses, the mines?

And so, in 2021, 25 different states in June and July either stopped or cut emergency benefits that they had added to federal relief. Yet, a subsequent study showed no difference in worker return in the states that cut their benefits in half with those that kept them steady. But those states that did cut benefits were negatively affected by cuts in consumer spending.

Desmond suggests we failed the test. Ignoring the other reasons workers stayed home: the legitimate concern they’d be confronted with unsafe working conditions, and didn’t want to get Covid. Or because schools were closed and there was no available and affordable childcare, many were forced to stay home.

But, again, the lesson was clear. Aid from the government endangers the dependency of the worker on those who provide and profit from his/her work. Roosevelt called welfare a drug, “a subtle destroyer of the soul”; Goldwater decided recipients were “professional chiselers”; Reagan railed against “welfare queens”; and Bill Clinton was proud to dismantle “the cycle of dependency” by ending “welfare as we know it”—a bipartisan effort to mock and discount those suffering from the inequities of our economics. Of course, all of them had no problem making it ever easier for those at the top to receive welfare in the form of tax breaks and incentives to expand and sell their goods and services. The myth serves a second purpose, because don’t many Americans believe it’s the lazy Black people most likely looking for the free ride? Yet another justification for racism. Because if it’s true, it’s not racist to think it.

The truth is that most people receiving financial aid use that money to buy food, clothing, pay rent and spend a smaller percentage on alcohol, tobacco, and entertainment than richer folks.

Meanwhile, just 25 percent of eligible families actually take advantage of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, while less than half of older Americans eligible for SNAP actually apply and receive them. Only 20 percent of eligible families take advantage of CHIP. The reality is that poor people are often unwilling to take advantage of or acknowledge that they need aid. In the midst of the 2008 Great Recession, while 10 percent of Americans were unemployed, only a third of that amount took unemployment benefits. Desmond calculates that by not taking advantage of a host of programs, the poor are leaving $142 billion on the table. Exactly where is this rush of the welfare kings and queens to drain the Treasury. How extensive is this welfare dependency?

Desmond then turns his attention to the far less talked about $193 billion subsidies for mostly white family homeowners earning six figures—subsidies far larger than the $53 billion housing assistance for low-income families.

“If we really want to talk welfare, let’s talk about $1.8 trillion in tax breaks mostly going to the richest families in America. More money than we spend on education, on housing, healthcare, law enforcement, and the rest of discretionary spending. The top 1% brings home more than all middle-class American families, and double the income earned by all the families in the bottom 20% … Those with incomes in the top 20% received 6 times more in tax breaks than the bottom 20 percent.” (Emphasis added.)

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) compares income distribution in the United States with other nations:

Desmond reminds us that there’s poor and there’s more poor for single folks who subsist on $6,380 annually, and for families of four who try to live on $13,100. There are 18 million of us living in deep poverty.

Want to increase your empathy index? How about we pretend you’re a family of four? Try living on $13,100 a year. How many meals do you think you can afford to eat out in Great Barrington? What some now regard as a great deal, that $18 burger and fries just isn’t happening if you’re broke. As my father used to say when I wasn’t about to get what I wanted, “Freedom in the recognition of necessity!”

You’ll probably need SNAP, the USDA’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—and the SNAP site for Massachusetts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities offers a quick guide to eligibility:

How often are the poor counseled to save, to prepare for the inevitable rainy day, let alone the monsoon that approaches? A medical emergency? Your car breaks down? If you want some minimal help with eating, you better not have any appreciable savings. By the way, the Congresspeople who could change all this make $174,000 a year plus travel, with 72 percent subsidized health care. House members work about 147 days a year.

Meanwhile, a July 5, 2023 article by Statistica cites an online survey by YouGov: “Americans today are lacking crucial savings needed for managing short-term emergencies and building long-term wealth … 27 percent of Americans had some savings below $1,000 as of May 2023, while 12 percent said they had no savings at all.” (Emphasis added.) Which makes 39 percent of Americans with less than $1,000. You think that might be an alternate indicator of poverty?

The need to keep wages low is enforced by Wall Street. When Walmart’s need to maintain its workforce prompted a 2009 decision to raise wages to $9 an hour, investors disapproved and undid $20 billion in market value by selling off and dropping share value by 10 percent. And while many Americans own shares, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 80 percent of the total value of stocks.

Since 1979, while the wages of the top one percent of workers more than doubled, the wages of the bottom 90 percent only grew by 24 percent. After World War II, inflation-adjusted wages grew by two percent a year before dropping in 1979 and beyond to only 0.3 percent a year.

So, real wages adjusted for inflation have gone down, not up. For workers with a high school diploma, they went down 2.7 percent from 1979 to 2017, with adults now working the jobs many of us worked after school and summers: behind grocery counters, stocking stores overnight, in coffee shops, cleaning toilets.

As for college graduates between the ages of 25 and 64, fully a third make less than $59,371, the median income. Full-time secure jobs are disappearing. There are now more temps working for Google than full-time employees. Only 63,000 of the 750,000 who make their products actually work for Apple. Employers now insist on non-compete clauses that make it harder for employees to quit and find similar employment. Once employees, now-independent contractors must supply once-company benefits like travel, health insurance, overtime, workers’ comp, vacations and paid holidays.

We have often heard about the power of special interests, almost always meant to refer to organized labor, but just one arm of the pro-business lobby, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, outspent unions $35 million to $25 million in one year to fight against raising corporate taxes and the minimum wage. Uber had 370 different lobbyists working in 2016 in 44 states.

Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times” showed us how factory owners sped up the assembly line, but today’s computers track keystrokes and everywhere the browser goes and for how long. For secretaries, data entry personnel, those who answer phones, or drive trucks, time is quantified and worker productivity monitored.

Meanwhile, the rich don’t want to know how harder life is made when owners refuse to raise or—worse—cut wages when governments slash aid. Add imprisonment to the mix, Desmond suggests, which provides an added benefit of disappearing a whole lot of poor people. And prison populations multiply with fines and penalties and takings, a minor mistake made worse and worse. Their numbers don’t count in our statistics about poverty. All it takes is some missed payments, unpaid bills to lead someone down the road to incarceration.

Poverty brings its own embarrassments. If the American ethos is that anyone can succeed if they work hard, and if the less fortunate can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, then those who don’t are irredeemable. The movies and the talk shows offer up the athlete who has come from the slums to his $40 million deal. This oft-repeated proof of concept, leaves so many to a shameful resignation. If only I had a jump shot, could throw a slider, block that penalty kick, look like Ryan Gosling or Jennifer Lawrence. Poverty, Desmond suggests, is re-imagined to suggest that it is caused by a series of ill-advised decisions or stupidity.

Always looking up from the poor to the wealthy can trigger a kind of madness. ProPublica offers a new piece by Paul Kiel, “How Harlan Crow Slashed his Tax Bill by Taking Clarence Thomas on Superyacht Cruises.” In the article, Kiel explains how billionaire Harlan Crow benefited from allowing Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife to take luxury jaunts on his yachts and private plane. Like other multi-millionaires, Crow created a separate leasing company to rent his luxury yacht out for charter—then really didn’t, except to himself for when he and his friends went on luxury cruises. Such a scheme enabled Crow to deduct his expenses and repairs and to save himself a fortune in taxes. Crow, it seems, pays a remarkably reasonable 15 percent of his income in taxes, less than most middle-income taxpayers.

Desmond claims our government is not for the poor, but against them, and for the others like Crow.

Meanwhile, here at home, Facebook’s Great Barrington Community Board hosts an argument about affordability and housing—most recently, centered on the new housing project helmed by the Community Development Corporation of South Berkshire. The debate centered on whether or not the new apartments are truly affordable. The CDC writes: “our newest co- development, Windrush Commons, will offer 49 clean, new homes in early 2023. But that is not enough—we are looking for creative new ways to increase housing …”

According to Carol Bosco Baumann, the Executive Director of CDC of South Berkshire, “Windrush Commons has 15 units with rental assistance—eight with Project Based Section 8, and seven with Massachusetts Rental Vouchers (MRVP). Three of the units are one-bedroom, nine are two-bedroom, and three are three-bedroom. Windrush Commons has 34 units for individuals at or below 60% of the Area Median Income.”

Housing Navigator Massachusetts offers this information for Windrush Commons:

Here’s a look at cost:

There are those amongst us working hard to address the issue of affordable housing and they deserve our thanks. Despite their important efforts—and it’s asking far too much for one small non-profit to solve our decades-long developing affordability problem—there are severe ramifications when people confront the realities of the marketplace. For some, those unable to qualify or not interested in applying for rental assistance from the government, $1,059 a month for a one-bedroom apartment may seem an unattainable burden.

Rents have been soaring. In 2000, the median cost for rent was $483. In 2016, it jumped to $1,216. People attribute rising rents to a shortage in housing, but Desmond points out that rents have risen 14 percent in Birmingham, Ala., even though they have a vacancy rate of 18 percent; rents are up eight percent in Syracuse, with its vacancy rate of 12 percent. And he claims rental revenues have significantly outpaced owners’ expenses.

Studying the Census Bureau’s Rental Housing Finance Survey, Desmond discovered that, after deducting repairs and expenses, landlords made more money renting apartments in poor neighborhoods ($300 a month per apartment) than middle-income neighborhoods ($225 a month per apartment unit) or wealthy neighborhoods ($250 a month per unit.) Even for much older buildings, after deducting non-payment of rent and a variety of repairs, including roof, windows, boilers, plumbing, and electrical, the figures for poor neighborhoods netted $100 profit per apartment per month as compared to $50 profit per apartment in richer neighborhoods.

Desmond distinguishes between those he calls “slumlords” (those who attempt to squeeze as much money as possible from their tenants) and those who honestly attempt to supplement their income by providing descent housing.

As bad as poverty is for white people, it’s worse for people of color. The Federal Reserve notes, on average, a white household led by someone with a high school diploma has more money than a Black household led by a college graduate. The net worth of the median white household in 2019 was $188,200; the median Black household had a net worth of $24,100. Middle-class Black homeowners making from $75,000 to $100,000 were burdened with mortgage interest rates higher than the mortgages of white homeowners earning at or under $30,000.

The reality is that spending for many of these aid programs has increased. According to Desmond, spending for means-tested programs, minus spending for Medicaid, rose from $630 a person in 1980 to $1,448 in 2018. Medicaid in 2021 was $521 billion, the largest spending on the poor. This, of course, makes sense because the money never goes to the poor directly but to the medical/pharmaceutical industry, to doctors and hospitals, etc.

While early on, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) distributed financial aid to poor families, with 13 million receiving almost all of it in cash payments, after President Clinton ended welfare as we knew it, the shift sent the money to the states. By the time the state implemented Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the poor received 22 cents of each dollar spent. As Desmond tells us, various states used the money to underwrite programs I doubt the poor would have chosen: Oklahoma for 17 years spent $70 million on a marriage counseling program for all, poor or rich; Arizona for an abstinence-centered sex education program; Pennsylvania on anti-abortion pregnancy counseling centers; and Maine on a Christian summer camp. Taking the long way around to ending poverty.

Meanwhile, if we dare look up, we see what Desmond refers to as colossal wealth: 310,000 new powerboats in 2018, $100 billion on our pets, and $550 billion on travel down from $723 billion because of COVID. American cars are bigger, and our homes are three times larger than English homes. And something we’re well acquainted with in the South Berkshires: One in eight Americans have second homes.

I have always lived in this schizophrenic world of what Desmond calls “private opulence and public squalor.” I find both worlds exceedingly painful. My apartment with two others on 110th and Columbus for $87 a month, in the heart of the southern Harlem heroin trade. With three murders during several weeks, our bathroom abandoned because it was quickly overrun with roaches. And a few miles south and across the Park: a dear friend whose folks had a townhouse with its own elevator.

There are so many consequences for the rest of us as the few maximize their wealth, as a grievously unfair tax structure enables them to keep far more than they need while proper housing and adequate healthcare is unattainable for so many.

Desmond offers the truth according to Leo Tolstoy: “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back … It is really so simple. If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor.”

Which leads me to Desmond’s three ways we make the poor poor. The first is by exploiting them in a multitude of ways: controlling their wages as workers, their rents, their access to money, and costs to borrow, in banks and payday storefronts.

The second way is through our national priorities. Because alleviating poverty is not a priority any more than truly insisting that corporation protect the environment. The focus is rather prioritizing affluence and aiding the affluent. If we truly wanted to end poverty we could quickly reinstate a tax rate that focuses on raising enough money to provide adequate housing, education, and health care for all. The reality is that it is the rich who are dependent on our government far more than the poor. Our government, run by the rich, elected because of their campaign contributions, repays them in many ways by keeping them rich.

Third, this very same government, on state and local and federal levels, with the interconnected cooperation of the banks, the courts, the prisons, creates prosperous and exclusive communities for the wealthy while relegating the poor to live amongst others who are poor.

The fact is we make it hard to be poor and harder to escape poverty. Getting aid from the government is one of the hardest things you can do. I have taught college courses, but I was close to complete and abject surrender trying to navigate the Medicare website. My experience with applying for subsidized senior housing in Great Barrington ended in defeat—because after waiting years on the waiting list without seemingly getting any closer, I was somehow disappeared from the list. As for SNAP, I invite you to rent or borrow a poor person and help as they apply.

Desmond estimates that, on top of what we’re paying out now for welfare programs, it would cost $178 billion dollars to lift every American out of poverty; he estimates this figure could guarantee a decent place to live and would end homelessness and hunger.

Turns out it’s not hard to find the money. Here’s a headline from the September 8, 2021 New York Times:

But that $163 billion is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Natasha Sarin, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy:

“A well-functioning tax system requires that everyone pays the taxes they owe. Today, the ‘tax gap’—the difference between taxes that are owed and collected—totals around $600 billion annually and will mean approximately $7 trillion of lost tax revenue over the next decade. The sheer magnitude of lost revenue is striking: it is equal to 3 percent of GDP, or all the income taxes paid by the lowest earning 90 percent of taxpayers.” (Emphasis added.)

Reuters reported on IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig’s testimony in April 2021 before the Senate Finance Committee:

“Rettig told the Senate Finance Committee that the ‘tax gap’—the difference between taxes legally owed and revenue collected—has grown substantially since the last official estimate of a $441 billion annual average from 2011 to 2013. Rettig said the agency is ‘outgunned’ by increasingly sophisticated tax avoidance schemes, while years of budget cuts have left it with about 17,000 fewer revenue enforcement staff than it had a decade ago.”

How about a renewed effort to reassert the public good over private interest? Under the rubric of A Fair America, it’s time to once again organize all workers, of all colors, into a new generation of representative labor unions; a union of renters; a national campaign to end hunger; for national and affordable health care and to link these efforts with a coordinated campaign to address the one reality that threatens to make a mockery of all this effort, the escalating climate crisis.

Desmond urges a new more conscious approach to spending, becoming a poverty abolitionist—choosing to spend at companies with union workers (UPS rather than FedEx), drinking beers made by union members (Miller and Rolling Rock). There are clear examples, like the millions in the 1960s who supported Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and the Farmworkers Union by boycotting non-union grapes.

Desmond urges us to insist on the kind of inclusionary zoning they have in countries like Ireland and Spain requiring new developments to include a percentage of their units for low-income families.

Too often, we witness how one critical concern is pitted against another—solving homelessness versus ending cancer. As soon as someone talks about solving one pressing concern, someone else suggests it’s less important than another. But as Desmond notes, this is scarcity talking. For the moment, it seems we’re subject to the myth that we don’t have enough to solve even one of the problems let alone them all. But were we able to enforce equity, we would soon see we have the resources to improve life in so many ways. We don’t have to choose between taking care of the elderly or the children, poverty in communities of color or in rural white America.

Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, for instance, have taxed their populations and raised revenues approaching 38 percent of their GDPs. We are at 25 percent. Retrieving these stolen funds is the key to solving so much of what ails us. We’ve been taught that our current reality of too much poverty is merely the way of the world. It has always been this way. In fact, this chosen way has brought us not peace and prosperity but to the brink of unlivable temperatures and an emerging American oligarchy.

Everything Desmond suggests—and I wholeheartedly endorse—may seem audacious, even mad. It is, though, the best approach if we are to keep our dignity and maintain our soul. It was unbearable to live in the time of segregated lunch counters and schools. It is once again becoming unbearable to live as books are banned and rape victims are forced to birth unwanted babies. It is unbearable to watch as our veterans end up homeless or taking their lives. Desmond has made the case. Ours is a poverty, American made and American maintained.

How about we embrace what the great Leo Tolstoy offers: “If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor.”

Desmond quotes Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” And the corollary: I know from marching on the last tail of the March from Selma into Montgomery, Ala. that there is nothing more powerful than hope and purpose.

Desmond knows only a movement of a great numbers can make change happen. And he points out the obvious: that most of us will gain not lose from this better, more fair America.

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