By Daniel Lazare

Conservatives will sneer at Poverty, by America, for all the usual reasons. But serious leftists will too — not because of the facts it presents, but because of the platitudes that accompany them.

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. Crown, 304 pages, $28.

Poverty, by America, a new book by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, paints a harrowing picture of how the United States doesn’t help the poor, but seemingly goes out of its way to make their plight worse. As the somewhat awkward title suggests, poverty isn’t just something that happens, but something that is caused.  This is entirely correct as anyone who’s studied the problem in a halfway-honest matter can attest. Desmond is therefore to be commended. But there’s a problem: he lards his otherwise devastating account with some of the most puerile politics this side of Occupy Wall Street.  Conservatives will sneer at Poverty, by America, for all the usual reasons. But serious leftists will too — not because of the facts it presents, but because of the platitudes that accompany them.

Desmond, who studies housing issues via a program known as the Eviction Lab, points out that, on paper, the US government is throwing a growing amount of money at the problem. Not counting Medicaid, expenditures in constant dollars on the nation’s dozen largest means-tested benefit programs have gone from $630 per person in 1980 to $1,448 in 2018. That’s a 130-percent increase. But less and less of this goes to the needy because more and more is siphoned off. In 1996, for instance, Bill Clinton’s celebrated welfare reforms took Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the much-maligned cash-giveaway program for single-family households, and replaced it with block grants to the states. As “laboratories of democracy,” they’re supposed to know how to spend such funds better than bureaucrats in faraway Washington. Yet the result was a carnival of corruption that allowed the states to shower money on friends, cronies, and various right-wing causes.

Oklahoma thus took $70 million in TANF money and spent it on a local “marriage initiative,” whose purpose is to provide counseling for anyone who wants it, poor or otherwise. Pennsylvania used TANF to finance anti-abortion centers, while Maine used it to finance a Christian summer camp.

Mississippi went wild. Desmond recounts how state politicians used TANF money to hire an evangelical singer to perform at rallies and concerts, to purchase a Nissan Armada, a Chevy Silverado, and a Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two members of her family, and to provide $1.1 million in fees for uplifting speeches that ex-NFL quarterback Brett Favre was supposed to give, but never quite got around to delivering. (He eventually returned the money.) They spent TANF bucks on college football tickets, on a private school, on a free 12-week fitness camp for state legislators — which is to say themselves — and on a university “wellness center.” More money went to a ministry run by an ex-professional wrestler named Ted DiBiase. Other states were less imaginative. Instead of throwing away TANF money on such projects, they merely socked it away. Tennessee put a whopping $790 million in the bank rather than see it go to the poor people for whom it was intended.

The bottom line is that just 22 cents out of every TANF dollar winds up going to recipients. Instead of more, the poor wind up with less. Poverty, by America, points out how society shortchanges members of the underclass in other ways as well. Landlords typically squeeze more rental income out of them than out of tenants who are better off. Banks hit them with nearly $12 billion a year in overdraft fees, while payday lenders in states like Texas, Wisconsin, and California charge as much as 664 percent in interest for a two-week loan.

What makes it even more maddening is that at the same time, the government is running a welfare program for the rich that couldn’t be more generous. The main culprit is the mortgage deduction, which, along with other homeowner tax breaks, cost $193 billion a year as of 2020, three-and-a-half times what Washington spends on direct housing assistance for low-income families. Money like that may not seem like a subsidy since, rather than a direct outlay, it’s built into a tax code that has more holes than Swiss cheese. But the effect is the same. As Desmond puts it, poor families “have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidies, but only one looks (and feels) that way.”

Yes, that multimillion-dollar McMansion out in the ’burbs with the swimming pool out back is as much the result of public largesse as a housing project in an inner city with nonworking elevators, dimly lit hallways, and cracked sidewalks littered with broken glass. In fact, it’s even more so. Although Desmond doesn’t go into it, he might have pointed out that the cul-de-sac on which the mansion sits is also a public benefit given that a mixture of federal, state, and local funds have gone into building and maintaining it even though its sole function is to serve a private home. The same goes for water mains, sewage lines, and local cops whose job is to make sure that the wrong kind of people stay far away. Desmond goes on in a similar vein about other upside-down social policies — health-insurance tax breaks whose benefits flow disproportionately to the upper rungs, heavy reliance on sales taxes that weigh more heavily on those lower down, and so on. As Lightnin’ Hopkins once sang, “It’s a sin to be rich, but it’s a low-down shame to be poor” because government exacerbates their plight instead of alleviating it.

But when Desmond shifts from description to analysis, his logic turns fuzzy. “Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves,” he writes. “Are we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky — connected to all this needless suffering?”

What is he saying — that some of us are at fault merely because we have a bachelor’s degree? “How do we, today, make the poor in America poor?… First, we exploit them. We constrain their choice and power in the labor market, the housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Those of us who are not poor benefit from these arrangements.” But who is “we”? A “waitron” who benefits merely because he or she owns her own home? How does a teacher or firefighter benefit — because they belong to a union?

Photo: Wiki Common

What’s dangerous about such statements is that they imply that the blame lies with ordinary working people rather than the corporate titans who really run the country. “Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure,” he writes, “but so do consumers who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market.” Would society be better off if workers didn’t have pensions and instead stayed on the job until they keeled over at a desk or factory?

Things get even worse when the author starts rolling out solutions. Washington, he says, should close the tax loopholes that allow wealthy corporations and individuals to avoid paying $1 trillion a year. It should stop companies from taking advantage of overseas tax havens. It should raise the top marginal tax rate and the corporate rate, too, and should wind down the mortgage deduction. It should “increase[e] the maximum taxable amount of earnings for Social Security so that high- and low-income workers are taxed at the same rate.” (Low-income workers currently pay more.) “We could scratch out another $37.3 billion if we treated capital gains and dividends for wealthy Americans the same way we treat income for tax purposes.”

Yes, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. There’s nothing wrong with Desmond’s list. Indeed, much of it is quite sensible. But none of it is going to happen. Rather than advancing, America is rushing backwards due to a growing structural breakdown, which is why it’s pointless to talk about such proposals without attending to the real problem at hand. Capitol Hill is a war zone, politics are unequal, and demagogues are flourishing. We’ve already seen one coup attempt and will undoubtedly see more. Yet there seems to be no way out. Desmond is so focused on the individual that he loses sight of the immense mechanical failure pressing down on society as a whole.

After all, it’s not that hard to figure out what’s going on. America has a grotesquely undemocratic Senate that gives equal weight to Wyoming and California even though the latter’s population is nearly 70 times greater. It has an Electoral College that is biased in favor of rural whites, a House of Representatives disfigured by gerrymandering, and a dysfunctional amending process that makes constitutional reform all but impossible. When a country grows as undemocratic as America is today, stuff happens. One person-one vote gives way to one dollar-one vote. The more bucks you have, the more politicians you can buy and the more opportunities you get to stick it not only to the poor but to the working class as well. Desmond ends his book by thanking all the rich people who have made his work possible — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others. It’s quite a list. Could it be that he fails to examine the real problems weighing down on American society because his patrons prefer that he look elsewhere?

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He currently writes regularly for the Weekly Worker, a socialist newspaper in London.