Poverty, by America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “How We Rely on Welfare”

Chapter 5 begins with the COVID-19 pandemic and the infusion of aid from the US government to prevent millions of Americans from falling into poverty. The programs were massively successful, as rates of poverty declined even as unemployment spiked. However, these measures were still controversial because in some cases, they paid the unemployed more than what they were making at their jobs and so were viewed as encouraging people to stay at home. The data do not sustain this contention since states with more generous provisions did not suffer higher levels of unemployment, and yet the myth endured that the unemployed were lazy and living off government handouts.

According to Desmond, this idea represents the latest iteration of an old myth that workers will succumb to laziness without an acute threat of deprivation hanging over them. It has morphed into the modern idea—very common in American politics—that receiving government assistance encourages dependency, and so efforts to help the poor will only harm them in the long run. Such ideas also thrive on stereotypes of Black people being the primary recipients of welfare, feeding into the perception of their being lazier than whites (even though whites are, in fact, more likely to be receiving public assistance). Data show that contrary to this myth, those receiving welfare spend less of their money on luxuries, alcohol, or drugs than wealthier people. Evidence also shows that welfare recipients are far more likely to use it to relieve a temporary financial setback rather than as a primary, long-term income. Instead of extracting welfare for their benefit, the poor underutilize the programs available, leaving billions of dollars on the table every year.

The public conversation on welfare tends to leave out the fact that wealthier people rely on government assistance to a much greater degree than the poor but do not call it “welfare,” thus avoiding any stigma. The government spends billions on subsidizing mortgages, employee healthcare plans, and college savings portfolios, all of which benefit the wealthy people who can buy a home, hold a well-paying job, and send their children to college. These programs cost vastly more than food stamps or lower-income tax breaks and feature vastly higher percentages of participation. They constitute an “invisible welfare state” that is far less controversial than those provided to the needy. Part of the problem is that a tax break feels like the absence of a penalty rather than a positive benefit because Americans have been trained to view taxation as a burden rather than a necessary function of government.

Alternatively, people may believe that the rich and middle class are more deserving of government aid than the poor, but there is too much evidence in both society and everyday life showing that rewards do not always correspond with merit. Desmond concludes that those who benefit want to keep things the way they are and thus do not support the kind of welfare that does not benefit them or people like them.

Chapter 6 Summary: “How We Buy Opportunity”

Chapter 6 begins with the point that many Americans are wealthy, and not just the 1%. People spend billions on pets, boats, and vacations, and their cars and homes are vastly larger than in other developed countries. At the same time, they feel profound anxiety about their economic condition, which prevents them from seeing themselves as contributing to the problem of poverty.

A major problem is that as some people become wealthier, they are less reliant on public services and thus view them as unimportant, fleeing into their own private networks and making things worse for those who still rely on the public programs. It does not necessarily create physical distance—poverty often lives side-by-side with wealth—but it splinters them into different realities. Personal spending has outstripped public investment, and public investment has declined as a percentage of government spending.

A major cause has been a series of large tax cuts, beginning in the 1980s, that gutted funding for public services. While this policy is most closely associated with Republicans, the solidly Democratic California of the 1970s set a precedent by capping the rise of property taxes, severely curtailing its funding for education. This was largely a response to the desegregation of schools, with white families pulling out of a public service they now had to share with Black children and fleeing to the suburbs or sending their children to private school.

In many communities across America, good schools and pleasant public spaces are the exclusive domain of those who can afford to live near them. Various programs have tried and failed to move the poor into more advantageous neighborhoods, but zoning laws have proven to be as effective as barbed wire in protecting those communities against perceived outsiders. Once it became illegal to ban certain kinds of people from neighborhoods, communities instead banned the kind of housing such people needed and thereby achieved the same result.

Liberal communities often depart from their professed values when it comes to allowing public housing near their own homes. Social elites have often championed desegregation for public facilities that they do not use, enraging the white working class. They do not want the values of their homes to go down or for schools to have to stretch their resources and thus give less attention to their own children, but this has a severe impact on those who remain excluded. Liberals appeal to one another by insisting that social change need not disrupt their comforts, but if that were true, such changes would have already happened.

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

In these chapters, Demond revisits both The Myths of Scarcity in American Society and how Private Opulence and Public Squalor exist simultaneously. For Desmond, the perpetuation of poverty exists both on the level of social discourse—via myths and stereotypes about welfare and government spending—and through the physical structures and resources in society, through which public services become ever more neglected as the more privileged classes retreat into the private spheres.

As Desmond points out in this pair of chapters, nearly every major idea that governs the public discussion of poverty reflects The Myths of Scarcity in American Society. The poor are blamed for soaking up public wealth in the form of welfare and are denigrated as lazy and greedy—these stereotypes make it easier to vilify the poor by casting them as a burden to the supposedly more hardworking citizens while also attributing moral failings to them (i.e., laziness) as though poverty were a matter of personal character. As Desmond explains, these stereotypes are false: He emphasizes that most welfare recipients use their money carefully and often rely on welfare only for short-term crises. By contrast, it is the affluent who rely far more on government assistance in the form of mortgage subsidies and tax cuts—benefits that last for years and years, creating a significant long-term cost for governments. It is also wealthier citizens who are more likely to spend money on luxuries and drugs than their poorer counterparts, suggesting that it is the more privileged in society who are more prone to spending money in reckless or unnecessary ways.

Desmond’s findings thus challenge the discourse around welfare in several key ways. First, he shows that the poor are usually neither feckless nor eager to take more than they absolutely need, suggesting that the moral vilification of the poor has no basis in reality. Second, in revealing that billions of government assistance go unclaimed every year, he stresses that the poor are not being an economic burden—if anything, they are not even receiving what they are already theoretically entitled to. Third, he challenges how and why the term “welfare” is applied only to benefits given to the poor instead of being applied equally to those given to the middle class and wealthy. Desmond asserts that the benefits the more privileged enjoy are also a form of government welfare, and it is only by avoiding the term and its implications that the privileged can present such benefits as well-deserved breaks instead of government handouts.

Desmond also highlights the persistent contrast of Private Opulence and Public Squalor in American society, which he identifies as yet another structural factor that creates and exacerbates poverty. He decries the decline of public spending thanks to tax cuts as starving public services and programs of much-needed money, thereby making public services less efficient, less numerous, and of lesser quality than they would be under a more generous funding model. Since the poor are the most dependent upon public services, the decline of these services in turn makes the conditions of poverty even more severe.

At the same time, Desmond characterizes the decline of public services as the fault of both the conservative and the more liberal spheres of society. He stresses that even those who profess liberal views and concern for greater equality and justice in society are often reluctant to make any real sacrifices of their own to better the situations of others. His example of the resistance to public housing illustrates this dilemma. Even many liberals object to social housing in their own neighborhoods, wishing to safeguard the value of their properties. Desmond thus demonstrates how poverty is fed, in part, by a cycle of avoidance and ignorance: The less the privileged depend on public services, the less aware they are of the issues faced by such services and those dependent upon them; the more poverty is kept out of sight through the economic segregation of neighborhoods, the easier it is to believe unfair stereotypes about the poor or those on welfare and to in turn oppose funding better welfare programs and more affordable housing.