Poverty, by America

📝 Notes

• Pickers in Amazon warehouses have access to vending machines dispensing free Advil and Tylenol.
• Long-term employment has declined steadily in the private sector, particularly for men, and temp jobs are expected to grow faster than all others over the next several years.
• Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse. A third of Americans live without much economic security, working as bus drivers, farmers, teachers, cashiers, cooks, nurses, security guards, social workers
• Hidden behind the system’s vague abstractions—justice, law and order—is the fact that the overwhelming majority of America’s current and former prisoners are very poor. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, almost seven in ten Black men who didn’t finish high school will have spent a portion of their life in a cage. Prison robs people of the prime of their life, taking not only the sleepy, slow years at the end but also the pulsing, hot years in the middle. In prisons, of course, they will remain poor, earning in their prison jobs between 14 cents and $1.41 an hour on average.
• You feel it in how effortlessly poor people are omitted from movies and television shows and popular music and children’s books, erasures reminding you of your own irrelevance to wider society.
• When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty. There is no flag for poor rights, after all.
• In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.
• Economists have churned out hundreds of similar studies, the bulk of them supporting the main finding of Card and Krueger’s bombshell paper by showing that increasing the minimum wage has negligible effects on employment.
• In 2020, almost a third of full-time workers between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree made less than the national median ($59,371).
• The most powerful lobbying force in the nation (as measured in sheer dollars spent) is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has mobilized against proposals to raise the corporate tax rate and the minimum wage and has come out against legislation designed to make it easier for workers to organize.
• In 2018, the median annual compensation was $30,500. In a paper published that year, researchers estimated that in a perfectly competitive market, it would be closer to $41,000 and could be as high as $92,000.
• Americans rank Amazon as one of the most trusted institutions in the country, second only to the military.
• Apartments in poor neighborhoods generated roughly $100 a month in profit, while those in rich neighborhoods generated only $50 a month. Across the United States, landlords in poor neighborhoods do not just come out ahead. After accounting for all their costs, they typically enjoy profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities.
• Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.
• Our country is not divided into “makers,” who can support themselves through work, and “takers,” content to eke out a small life on government handouts. Virtually all Americans benefit from some form of public aid. Republicans and Democrats rely on government programs at equivalent rates, as do white, Hispanic, and Black families.
• The average middle-class family had an income of $63,900, paid $9,900 in federal taxes after all deductions, and received $13,600 in social insurance benefits (like disability and unemployment).
• The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363. The top 20 percent of income earners receives six times what the bottom 20 percent receives in tax breaks.
• We spent over $100 billion on our pets and over $550 billion on leisure travel—down from $723 billion the previous year, owing to COVID-19. Our cars are bigger than everyone else’s in the world. Our homes are, too. You could fit three newly built English homes into the average new American home. More than one in eight American families own property besides their primary residence.
• Enough money brings “financial independence,” which tellingly does not signal independence from work but from the public sector. There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers.
• In many corners of America, a pricey mortgage doesn’t just buy a home; it also buys a good education, a well-run soccer league, and public safety so thick and expected it appears natural, instead of the product of social design
• After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed explicit racial segregation in zoning, Atlanta changed its two residential zones from “R-1 white district” and “R-2 colored district” to “R-1 dwelling house district” and “R-2 apartment house district.”
• It cannot both be true that excluding poor people from high-opportunity communities enriches the lives of the people inside the wall while degrading the lives of people outside of it and that tearing down the wall and welcoming the poor into those communities will come at no cost to the current residents. Affluence allowed those residents to climb over the wall, and the wall protected and grew their affluence.
• 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.
• Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair—the externality of stockpiled opportunity. Wealth traps breed poverty traps.
• The IRS now estimates that the United States loses more than $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes, most of it owing to tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families.
• Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.
• Most states still allow restaurant and other service workers to be paid a subminimum wage, which is a meager $2.13 an hour at the federal level, forcing nearly 5 million workers to survive on tips.
• After the pill became widely available in the late 1960s, women’s college enrollment and employment rates shot up, allowing them to gain more independence from men. Today as then, women with access to effective contraception go to school longer and participate in the job market at higher rates than women who don’t. They have children later in life and have fewer of them. Yet the most reliable contraception remains out of reach for many poor women, and most of their pregnancies are unintended
• Compared to women who had had abortions, those forced to give birth were more likely to live below the poverty line four years later. The two groups of women were on similar paths at the time they got pregnant, but access to abortion caused their lives to diverge.
• We hold many ethical beliefs, but we tend to act on them only when we receive a social push.
• Doing the right thing is often a highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly process,
• When affluents live, work, play, and worship mainly alongside fellow affluents, they can grow insular, quite literally forgetting the poor. It brings out the worst in us, feeding our prejudices and spreading moral decay. Engaging with one another in integrated communities allows us to recognize our blind spots, de-siloing our lives and causing families well above the poverty line to become bothered by problems that affect those below
• Giving money away is a beautiful act, and yet poverty persists. Rather than throwing money over the wall, let’s tear the wall down. The evidence is in, and it’s clear: We can integrate our communities without depressing property values, compromising school quality, or harming affluent children.
• “I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share,” Kimmerer writes, “and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else.”
• A nation invested in ending poverty is a nation that is truly, obsessively committed to freedom.
• That “there are many ‘lost Einsteins’ ” who would have made enormous contributions had they been allowed to reach their full potential. Poverty reduces people born for better things.