Impoverishing

THE POOR will always be among you, so said the savior, who evidently was well aware that a mere two thousand years hence a great and powerful nation, the most prosperous in human history, would arise almost as if to prove his point. He failed to ask "why", even though he himself doubtless knew why. He knew human nature. Finally, someone has asked the question and provided an intellectually defensible answer. Mathew Desmond, Princeton sociologist, begins his seminal monograph "Poverty, By America", with the obvious question often asked but seldom if ever answered by thoughtful citizens, including those well versed in economics: "Why, in the wealthiest nation in human history, does poverty persist among so great a percentage of the population"? That percentage is about eleven percent, or one in nine Americans, the definition of "poverty" having been determined by the Johnson administration in 1964 when LBJ's "War On Poverty" commenced. The definition is based on food insecurity, and has been amended over the years to include such things as income to rent ratio, among other factors. The upshot, the book's central theme, is that poverty in America is by design, not accident. Racism is a big factor. How can we afford a single payer national health care system with all these unworthy darkly pigmented people everywhere? Desmond echoes an oft mentioned fact: that in these United States we have socialism for the wealthy and corporate welfare, and free market capitalism for everyone else, including the very poor. For decades our corporate masters have prosecuted a war against the working class, spearheaded by the deliberate destruction of labor unions. A huge perrcent of newly created prosperity is siphoned off by the wealthy elite, in the form of tax breaks and write offs, rather than evenly distributed among those who actually produce it; the working class. Government subsidies for the upper twenty percent of income distribution amount to roughly thirty five thousand dollars a year, and for the poor, the lower twenty percent, the figure is twenty five thousand. Everyone, to some extent, lives off the government dole, the wealthiest most of all. The huge wealth and income gap between the wealthiest one percent, the wealthiest twenty percent, the everyone else is growing, and has been since the Reagan administration drastically cut the highest tax rate from about seventy percent to twenty eight percent. The author points out that by merely taxing the wealthiest one percent at a slightly higher rate, paying their fair share, as he puts it, nearly three hundred billion dollars in revenue could be raised, sufficient to virtually eliminate poverty. The government redistribution programs of Johnson's "Great Soceity" cut poverty in America in half, and during the recent pandemic the child tax credit cut poverty among children in half, but only temporarily, as the program expired. People who care about the sustainable economic health of America will continue to ask "why". Now, they have an answer, if they choose to accept it.