Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Hello friends! It’s been a while. On July 11th, the Intervale, where I work, and where much of Burlington gets its food, experienced catastrophic flooding. You can learn more about the flood here and here, and contribute to a fund for farmer recovery here. Since then, I’ve tried to write about the flood a bunch of times, but couldn’t do it yet, so here’s something else.
Today’s ferments:
I’ve been reading Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. It’s a good read: full of information, but not a punch in the face with data. There’s some narrative, a few real characters who illustrate the point, and coherent recommendations about what we could do to end poverty in the United States.
Here’s the basic idea. Over the last 50 or 70 years, this country has gotten better and better at providing a social safety net to the wealthy, mostly via tax breaks, and the high quality of life that you get when all social benefits are concentrated in neighborhoods where only wealthy people are allowed to live. The government gives much more money away/back to people who already have money.
But that money comes in the form of refunds (on taxes, on mortgages, so on) whereas what we think of as the social safety net—SNAP, WIC, disability, unemployment, etc—is given in the form of upfront benefits. Because, Desmond explains, people typically overstate losses and understate gains, the ‘loss’ of spending on the poor makes a bigger mark in the American consciousness than the ‘gain’ of tax refunds. This yields one of Desmond’s central points: public spending for poverty alleviation and abolition has an image problem.
He cites the dearth of celebration about effective programs as the core of that issue. For example, the COVID-era Emergency Rental Assistance program helped prevent evictions and allowed folks to spend money on other necessities rather than rent. It made headlines at its launch, when the program wasn’t yet running smoothly, but immediately dropped out of the news when it started working incredibly well.
In the United States, we have no trouble marketing things to people. In an interview with Ezra Klein, Desmond even mentions this: if we did as good a job spreading the word about SNAP or disability payments as we do selling people sugary beverages or fossil fuels, the ‘uptake rate’ (how much eligible people use available programs) for poverty alleviation would rise, and people would have more access to money that’s already been set aside for them. This image and communication problem means that, through no fault of their own, America’s poor are leaving billions on the table.
In our age of staggering inequality, it’s worth spending time with the history of American poverty, and the creation of today’s wealth gap, which yawns between the one percent and the rest of us, but groans even louder across lines of race and gender. Genuine discussions of race- and gender-based discrimination and inequality are certainly not mainstream, although we might imagine or want them to be, but discussions of class are perhaps even more taboo in this land of the free and home of the dreamers, the perpetual and expansive imaginary middle class.
Most Americans believe they are middle class, which is simply not true. Desmond talks about how we—especially those of us with respectful intentions—refer to “low-income Americans” or “working-class people” or even “the working poor,” but rarely frame discussions of class around the poor and the rich (or the robbers and the robbed, per George Orwell).
The Poor People’s Campaign is a notable exception; additionally, The Debt Collective organizes around debtor identity, and Resource Generation mobilizes young people with wealth to redistribute that stolen excess. (If you identify or are drawn to any of this work, see about joining them! We all have power when we organize, and the people behind this work have put in countless hours to unite folks with similar class experiences and build solidarity among folks with different ones.)
Poverty, by America reads as a powerful economic treatise on what could be, citing this public relations issue with poverty as the first target. Desmond imagines visible celebration and praise of successful poverty alleviation programs, and investment in closing the wealth gap by giving the IRS capacity to force the rich to pay their taxes (a cool $175 billion per year). By all means, let’s do it! I’m convinced.
But there remains a thorn in my side from Desmond’s framing. Throughout the book, he compares the failures of poverty’s PR to the success of the climate movement. I’m sorry. I love the climate movement, but it’s not successful. Look around! We are winning slowly out here, which is the same as losing.
That’s not what Desmond is talking about, though—which is even more troubling. He’s not talking about the smoky skies or the El Niño from hell we’re about to live (and die) through. He’s not talking about the stranglehold the fossil fuel industry still has on the US government. He’s talking about people wanting to buy ‘green’ products (which most people don’t do anyway, because they’re more expensive) and how it’d be great if people also preferred products from union shops, or corporations that don’t exploit (no comment on that one).
If Desmond’s proxy for successful poverty abolition is the climate movement, we’re in trouble. If not for the acknowledgement that “the Washington that passed transformational legislation outlawing racial discrimination, expanding access to healthcare, food, and education, and slashing the poverty rate was just as broken as the Washington of today,” it would be almost impossible to suspend our disbelief at Desmond’s optimism.
The climate movement is not only missing the mark as a movement (not putting pressure on the government the way that the Civil Rights movement did, for example) but also has been undermined by decades of deception by the fossil fuel industry. Products—including fossil fuels themselves—being marketed as ‘green’ does not make them any better. In fact, it makes them worse: we accept that something is being done, and become willing to ignore inaction in exchange for a sham effort.
I find myself both charmed and infuriated at Desmond’s suggestion that the climate movement is mainstream, and poverty abolition is not. He particularly misses the mark here:
“[The scarcity mindset] also pits economic justice against climate justice. When lawmakers have tried to curb pollution and traffic gridlock through congestion pricing, for instance, charging vehicles a fee if they enter busy urban neighborhoods during peak hours, critics have shot down the proposal by claiming it would hit low-income workers in transit deserts the hardest. In many cases, this is true. But it doesn’t have to be. We allow millions to live paycheck to paycheck, then leverage their predicament to justify inaction on other social and environmental issues.”
Surely, he is correct that we could un-make the choice to allow millions to live paycheck to paycheck; that’s the thesis of the whole book. But all environmental corners we cut get externalized onto the poor, and transit deserts and car reliance are no exception. I wrote about this recently in a totally different context, but the concept is the same. Whenever things are artificially cheap, or artificially available, it is at the expense of people and the planet. Expense to the planet directly harms people who are breathing poisoned air, or drinking toxic water, or being forced to replace traditional foodways with sugary processed alternatives.
Desmond’s book reifies and gives texture to a vast swath of American experience. It dreams of an America where we can turn our attention to other matters than poverty alleviation, because this is a problem easy enough to fix. Doing so would free up countless people to demand meaningful climate action, and give the climate movement the economic justice teeth it needs across the board, not just in the pockets of organizing where folks have worked hard to infuse that analysis.
This America, one where people are paid a living wage, have an affordable place to live, and access to healthcare, good food, and green space, is easily attainable if we tax the rich and care about our neighbors. On a small scale, we can and must fight for this. On a large scale, we will only generate the power and fieriness required for this wholesale transformation of our nation and our state if we build those strong connections on the small scale.
Whenever the assignment is to lift the floor—whether through a lens of poverty abolition or, say, liberation of Black women—the homework is to transform our society so we can believe that lifting the floor is worth shedding the status quo. Where shall we begin?