Poverty Abolitionism

 “Poverty, By America”by Matthew Desmond, 2023

This seems to be a re-run of Michael Harrington’s famous 1962 book The Other America, updated to today’s conditions related to poverty.  It is a wonky tour packed with facts, studies and surveys, making a case for “a redesigned welfare state.”  It is consciously not anti-capitalist, endorsing a “capitalism that serves the people.”  It advocates efficient tax collecting, including tax havens; lessening welfare to corporations and the upper middle class and increased taxes on the wealthy and corporate coffers. $1T per year is lost to tax avoidance in the U.S.  Then he says “we can’t spend our way out of this” with tax monies. So he endorses empowering the ‘poor’ and breaking down neighborhood segregation walls regarding class and ethnicity. He finally declares that ‘movements apply the heat.’  All this is familiar stuff. 

Desmond is a prof at Princeton whose main focus is on evictions and housing.  Now he’s enlarged his scope and is searching for a ‘theory’ of poverty.  I use his term ‘poor’ though it is a semi-class term that avoids the fact that most ‘poor’ people work, as even he recognizes.  Desmond never questions why the Roosevelt’s reforms, LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty and various subsequent anti-poverty programs have not actually reduced poverty in the U.S. - certainly not since LBJ 60 years ago. The impoverished working class is still with us, even with increased outlays. He does not make clear that tax monies are subsidies to the capitalists for paying unlivable wages, discharging workers, charging high rents and discriminating themselves  His NYT best-seller book Evicted became an answer on Jeopardy©, so let’s hear what he’s got to say. 

Desmond answers every upper-class, right-wing and centrist attack on poor people or government aid. He challenges the mostly racist ‘laziness’ myth and the idea that most people in poverty are black.  He points out that the mortgage tax deduction, property tax rebates, student loan breaks and 529 Plans are welfare programs for the higher reaches of the class structure.  He contends that wealthy families gain 40% more in government benefits than those at the bottom.  He looks at how poverty measures based on a 1965 food basket haven’t changed, and are just updated for inflation. For instance bourgeois “economists’ say each individual needs $4 a day in the U.S. to afford basic necessities, which is ludicrous.  He notes that those in prison, half-way houses, psych wards, homeless shelters and jails are not counted in statistics of poverty, which is far more than 2 million people. Prison, which affords a roof, regular food, health care of sorts and even a ‘job,’ might be superior to living on the streets!  He makes the point that Black men in the U.S. have the same life-span has men in Pakistan and Mongolia.

Desmond discovers that many poor people do not access federal poverty funds at the state level, which go unspent or are spent on non-poverty related issues.  This was most obvious in Mississippi but has happened in many states. Incidentally Mississippi is a state that has a child poverty rate similar to Costa Rica.  Poverty program applications for disability, SSI, SNAP, Medicaid, housing, temp assistance and unemployment are complicated or automatically rejected.  He gives statistics to show immigrants do not bring down wages or use social services.  Nor is the lack of marriage the problem, as it has become a ‘luxury good’ in his words, with many anti-poverty programs, along with incarceration, mitigating against marriage.  Raising the minimum wage was alleged for 50 years to increase unemployment – yet finally people studied its effect and found no correlation.  The U.S. has some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world with a pathetic sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in many states – another subsidy to capital. The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most successful anti-poverty measures, but it also subsidizes capitalist low pay and benefits.  Dark-skinned workers still make .74 to every dollar made by light-skinned ones in similar jobs, so racism is inherent in the whole color caste U.S. poverty system.

The Welfare Office - I've Been There!

Poverty affects health, thinking, violence, stress, learning and relationships.  Warned against ‘taking a Marxist path’ by a fellow senior academic, he nevertheless understands that poor people are exploited by employers, banks, check cashing outfits, pay-day lenders, slum lords, corner stores, temp agencies, gig work firms, mortgage brokers, rent-to-own fronts and courts. This is a ‘duh.’ Each year $61M in fees from banks, pay day lenders and check-cashing stores are gathered from mostly low-income workers.  Poverty can be made to pay!  In fact Desmond maintains that rents in ghettos are higher than outside of them.

Desmond makes a case that federal anti-poverty programs make a difference, especially during the pandemic.  Poverty levels actually dropped, as did evictions, due to the financial flows from the U.S. government. Child poverty was cut in half. Of course, corporate fraud rose too. He saw no increase in unemployment related to generous unemployment benefits. The “Great Society” of the 1960s halved poverty according to him too. He discusses whether aid programs should be ‘need’ based (as exists now in the U.S.) or universal (as in some European social democracies) like UBI.  He settles for ‘targeted’ aid, but targeted far higher on the economic scale.  He makes this decision given the classes of millionaires and billionaires in the U.S. who would benefit from universal aid.  Class rears its ugly head again.

Desmond looks at the impoverishment of the public sector in certain places, along with the rise in private wealth. This he connects to Reagans massive 1981 tax cut for the rich, which he calls the largest in history - just above Trump’s 2018 version.  Along with Prop.13 in California they knee-capped public spending.  Reagan cut HUD’s housing allowance by 70% for instance. Both were engines of public squalor and private accumulation. This has allowed segregation by ethnicity and net worth in neighborhoods, something busing couldn’t make a dent in.  He claims that $170B in government funds could almost eliminate poverty – an unlikely bet.     

“Empowering the poor” to Desmond means changing labor law, unionization, raising the minimum wage, getting rid of sub-minimum tip and field work wages, initiating housing cooperatives, advancing small dollar mortgages, outlawing usury, heightening consumer activism and more.  He does not mention a federal bank but does mention the Federal 502 Direct Loan program.  He stands for the right of abortion, as it has been shown that unwanted pregnancies throw families and children into poverty or more poverty. 

The second part to this is ‘tearing down the walls’ of class and ethnic discrimination with economic integration.  School districts, public services, hospitals, streets and roads, private enterprise – all are marked by geographic class status in urban and rural areas.  The rise of charter schools has amplified this, as these capitalist schools loot the public sector.  To him the key would involve multi-occupant buildings and apartments in single-family home areas that are ‘affordable’ – a concept no private builder actually complies with. He does note that mixed housing does not degrade property values. This building zone idea has been suggested by the centrist Democrats in Minneapolis, yet builders have objected to it as unworkable regarding ‘affordability.’ Desmond does not mention rent control or empty homes due to disuse, corporate ownership, short term rentals or AirBnB©.  As such he leaves the private real estate sector untouched.    

After reading through all the ‘musts’ in this book, his optimistic view that poverty can be abolished under capital through his ideas seems like a pipe-dream in the U.S.  It would take a social movement of far larger scale than his vague nod to ‘movements’ entails.  He mentions nothing about politics, for instance.  Wonks and the Democratic Party aren’t going to push this soft social-democratic agenda through.  It would involve a wholesale attack on capital in all its various guises by a mostly united working-class led by a competent leadership – a movement which would still have to stop on the brink of replacing capital itself, of socialization and nationalization of basic economic functions and entities.  Desmond advocates a social movement with one hand tied behind its back.

The fact that we have a class system across the world, but especially vile in the U.S., attests to a more systemic and structural problem. His avoidance of the term 'ruling class' testifies to this. A good book on the need to fight poverty, on some ways to do it, but whose solutions, though admirable, come up short. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Poverty” or “Poverty?  What is it Good For?” “The Lie of Global Prosperity,” “Under the Affluence,” “Toward Freedom” (T Reed); “U.S. Cities With the Lowest Life Expectancy,” “The Lower Depths” (Gorky); “Famished Road” (Okri); “Ragged Revolutionaries,” “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” “Price Wars,” “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance); “A Terrible Thing To Waste.” 

Red Frog / December 2, 2024