NPR interviewed Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond about his new book, Poverty, by America. Desmond says that we can afford to eliminate poverty, if we want to. Income inequality is a driving force behind disinvestment in public services, he says.
Over 11% of the U.S. population — about one in nine people — lived below the federal poverty line in 2021. But Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond says neither that statistic, nor the federal poverty line itself, encapsulate the full picture of economic insecurity in America.
“There’s plenty of poverty above the poverty line as a lived experience,” Desmond says. “About one in three Americans live in a household that’s making $55,000 or less, and many of those folks aren’t officially considered poor. But what else do you call trying to raise three kids in Portland on $55,000?”
Growing up in a small town in Arizona, Desmond learned firsthand how economic insecurity could impact a family’s stress level. He remembers the gas being shut off and his family home being foreclosed on. Those hardships would later drive his research — specifically the question of how so much poverty could exist within a country as wealthy as the U.S….
His new book, Poverty, by America, studies various factors that contribute to economic inequality in the U.S., including housing segregation, predatory lending, the decline of unions and tax policies that favor the wealthy. Desmond says that affluent Americans, including many with progressive political views, benefit from corporate and government policies that keep people poor.
“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.”
Desmond says that the growing affluence of those at the top drives it’s unwillingness to invest in public services:
If you are a family of means, you have the incentive to rely less and less on the public sector. So we used to want to be free of bosses, but now we want to be free of bus drivers. We don’t want to take the bus. We don’t want to often enroll our kids in the public school system. 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. And as we withdraw into the private opulence, we have less and less incentive to invest in public services…
This one statistic that I calculated just blew me away. So a recent study was published and it showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed, not paid more taxes, … we as a nation could raise an additional $175 billion every year. 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.
Matthew Desmond is a MacArthur Fellow and a principal investigator of the Eviction Lab, a research project focusing on poverty, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography. (Barron Bixler/Penguin Random House)
This is a rough estimate. I arrive at this number by looking at everyone under the poverty line, calculating the average it would take to just bring them over the poverty line and adding that all up. 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 reestablish the extended child tax credit that we rolled out during COVID. … [That]was basically a check for middle and low-income families with kids. That’s all it was. And that simple intervention cut child poverty almost in half in six months. We could bring that back again with $175 billion and still have money left over.
