Matthew Desmond

302 views  Apr 5, 2023

Why is America stricken by poverty despite being the most prosperous democracy in the world? Michael Steele is joined by Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," and Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Matthew discusses his new book, “Poverty, By America," which looks at why America hasn't made more progress in ending poverty, how the pandemic reframed eviction and how our government responded to it and how wealthy and middle class Americans perpetuate a system that keeps poor people poor.

If you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to leave a review or tell a friend! Check out the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Americ... Join the movement to end poverty: https://endpovertyusa.org/ Follow Matthew Desmond @just_shelter Follow Michael @MichaelSteele

"...As Desmond explained, “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money …. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” That’s why all paths lead to corporate doors and why Republicans would rather blame the poor than their corporate clients for what goes wrong.

So, as Desmond explains, it takes a movement. It takes people who see the problems to their roots with all the interconnections and are committed to dealing with them root and branch. When you hear Republicans saying that Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are too extreme or all the other seemingly bad names they have for them, understand they’re saying any regulation of their wealthy contributors is too much for Republicans. That’s what’s really “extreme” and unworthy...

Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist and the director of the university’s Eviction Lab, said America has a poverty problem, and poverty and food insecurity are deeply intertwined.

“Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction,” said Desmond. “It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death that comes early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.”

Desmond said housing assistance and food stamp programs are “effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year,” he said in a March 16 column in the New York Times. “But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.”

That disgrace is illustrated in the stats showing that 33 percent of Americans live in households making less than $55,000, he said.

“Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line,” Desmond said. “And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.”

He said Americans must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists to break this cycle.

“Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated,” he said. “And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all. Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.”

This includes

> appropriately addressing the housing crisis, which forces most poor renting families to devote at least 50 percent of their income to rent and utilities;

> immediately expanding housing vouchers to reduce the rent burden; pushing for “more transformative solutions” like scaling up the country’s public housing infrastructure; building out community land banks; and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families. "

Videos