Ending Poverty

We live in the wealthiest nation on earth, yet we have the highest poverty rate among advanced democracies. What is behind the perpetuation of American poverty, and what can be done to end it? As Matthew Desmond asks in his recent book, Poverty, By America, why is there “so much hardship in this land of abundance?”

Martin Luther King Jr. described poverty as one of the triple evils plaguing humankind along with racism and militarism. In addressing the challenge of poverty, King noted, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it” [Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967]

As have many other persons who have studied poverty in America closely, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Matthew Desmond recognize that most efforts to address poverty have been piecemeal and have lacked the comprehensive approach necessary to bring about significant systemic change.

In his 1967 work, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, King wrote, “At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.”

King continues: 

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing – they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else. I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?

King claimed that our inability to eradicate poverty is not a problem of resources, but rather it is a problem of the will. It represents a moral and spiritual deficiency of our society. The existence of poverty is a moral problem. The existence of poverty is immoral.

Many wealthy and powerful persons would have us believe that poverty is primarily the fault of the poor, that it is somehow a moral failure of the poor that they continue to be poor. But the actual evidence suggests that the moral blame for perpetuating poverty in our society rests not on the poor, but rather it is a moral failure of the rich and powerful who have created systems to maintain their wealth and power at the expense of the poor and most vulnerable among us. The culture wars that the wealthy fund and perpetuate are simply a diversionary tactic, a smokescreen that keeps the real sources of our problems hidden from view.

In his book Poverty, By America, Desmond notes other diversionary tactics used by the wealthy and powerful. He writes: 

Let’s call it the scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable – or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources … ” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.

POVERTY, BY AMERICA

And lately, we have seen that when the wealthy and the powerful have difficulties controlling democratic political processes for the sake of protecting their economic interests, they seem more than willing to weaken democracy itself and embrace increasingly autocratic means to pursue their ends.

The economist Joseph Stiglitz notes this increase in the ideological embrace of autocracy and argues that “resolving economic and political inequality is vital if we want people to reject authoritarianism” Stiglitz writes:

[E]conomic and political inequality have grown so extreme that many are rejecting democracy. This is fertile ground for authoritarianism, especially for the kind of rightwing populism that Trump, Bolsonaro and the rest represent. But such leaders have shown that they have none of the answers that discontented voters are seeking. On the contrary, the policies they enact when given power only make matters worse [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/01/global-democratic-politics-economic-reforms].

The reason their policies make matters worse is that they are blaming our social, economic, and political problems on everything but the actual core source of the problems.

The wealthy and powerful point the finger of blame at government, immigrants, entitlements, regulations, and even the poor themselves as a way of distracting us from seeing where the most blame lies for the perpetuation of human deprivation in the wealthiest country on earth – and the most blame lies in the greed of the wealthy themselves and the systems they have created to maintain, protect, and expand their power.

The wealthy and powerful want to blame teachers for our public education problems while completely ignoring the impact of poverty, economic injustices, and food insecurity experienced by students; and the wealthy are silent about the inequities caused by the use of property taxes as a key source of public education funding.

In my home city of Oklahoma City, the wealthy and powerful people who want us to pay between $500 million and $1 billion for a new basketball arena using a regressive sales tax are the same people who tell us we have an “entitlements” program problem in the United States.

The same wealthy and powerful persons who are very willing to cut Social Security are fighting tooth and nail to preserve government subsidies for fossil fuel companies, industrial agriculture, and other large corporate interests.

A country with the wealth of the United States should have no problem with funding social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We don’t have an entitlements problem. We have a greed problem.

All the while we are told that raising the minimum wage would damage the economy even though CEOS make hundreds of times more money than typical workers make. The purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968 was almost twice of what it is today [See: https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/items/1968-united-states-minimum-wage ]. In 1965, CEOs made about 21 times what their workers made, but in 2021, they made “399 times as much as a typical worker” [See https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/].

If we created and enforced a law that CEOs in the United States can make no more than 100 times as much as their lowest paid workers, I am guessing we would see an increase in the minimum wage pretty quickly.

The wealthy and powerful persons who say we cannot raise the minimum wage are the same persons who are perfectly fine with CEO salaries increasing at an inflation adjusted rate of 1,460% since 1978 [See https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/].

To preserve their wealth and power, the wealthy and powerful are willing to break our democracy and then they blame our broken democracy for all of our problems, conveniently ignoring that they are the ones who have broken our democracy and are the ones most responsible for and complicit in the rise of autocracy that comes when democracies are overtaken and co-opted by oligarchs.

The only way America can end poverty is to end the continuing hostile takeover of our democracy by the wealthy and powerful. Once we do that, the solutions for addressing poverty are not as difficult as they may seem – housing first to solve homelessness, universal healthcare, equal opportunities for education, a guaranteed minimum income, environmental justice for all, and full and equal participation of all persons in a vibrant democracy provide us with the answers to end poverty, but we first have to stop looking in the directions where the fingers of the wealthy and powerful are pointing and see that it is the greed of the wealthy and powerful that is at the root of the problems we are experiencing.

While building and maintaining an economic system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, the wealthy perpetuate the myth that security can only come from accumulating individual wealth rather than from the creation of just and beloved community. Until we recognize the true source of both our security and our flourishing, we will have an extremely difficult time ending poverty and addressing the other evils of human deprivation and ecological degradation that greed perpetuates.