July 12, 2023 • 48 mins
America is the richest country on earth, and yet we have the highest levels of poverty of any advanced democracy. Why is that? And what should we do about it? Matthew Desmond joins Ben and Khalil to discuss the rousing arguments of his new book Poverty, By America: we are all culpable for this problem, and it’s on us to fix it.
Additional links:
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Correction: Parole, Prison and the Possibility of Change by Ben Austen
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm Ben Austen. We are two best friends, one black,
one white.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends are.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Some of my best friends are in this show. We
wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply
divided and unequal country.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Today on the show we have the sociologist Matthew Desmond.
He is the author of a new book called Poverty
by America. Yes, an exploration of the United States, the
richest country in the world that has tremendous guard at
you in poverty. This book is a call to action,
and this problem is on all of us to understand
(01:15):
and work to fix.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Man. We are so happy to have matt on the show.
He studies and writes about what I also write about,
which is housing. His last book, Evicted, Poverty and Profit
in the American City, won a Pulitzer Prize. Yeah you'll
pin baby, Dad is coming.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Matthew Desmond. It is so wonderful to welcome you to
some of my best friends are.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
It's great to see you too. Thank you so much
for having.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Me and matt We got to see each other in
Chicago just a couple months ago while you're on your
book tour, and it was amazing to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Then, well, I've been living with your ideas for a
while because I just read your new book that's coming
out soon and loved it. I can't wait to see
it out in the world. And congratulations on that. And
what an incredible accomplishment. Band man, it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It has this very prideful smirk on his face.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I'm ready to be like I just dropped the recorder.
I'm like, done, done deal.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
In case you the listener, were wondering, yes, correction will
be at a bookstore near you soon, so listen. You
and I met each other at Harvard several years ago
when I joined the Kennedy School faculty, and we became
close friends. At the time, we were part of a
community of folks, including Diva Pager, to whom you dedicate
(02:43):
this book, a fear sociologist who helped us understand just
how pervasive structural racism and biases in our labor markets.
And I just got to tell you, you know, my
time at Harvard has never been the same since you left, man,
you abandoned me for Princeton, Like what a year later? Like,
what's up with that? We haven't really talked about this,
(03:03):
but I just need you to know I haven't been
happy since you left.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It was personal. I have to say, I miss the event,
I miss you, I miss our talks, I miss running
into you and our coffees and our and our beers.
And you know, Diva was such a powerful spiritual and
intellectual force in my life. And you know, she passed away,
(03:27):
as you know, too young, and a lot of her
energy and her spirit I hope to a channel in
this book and this work. So she was the best
of us. And thank you for opening up that conversation
with her memory.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, Matt. So, as you say,
we are the richest country in the world. It's crazy,
and yet we have more poverty, more poor people than
any other developed country. That's that's our story. And I
wanted to ask you about the writing of this book,
(03:59):
why this topic, Why focus on poverty.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Well, I've been working on poverty all of my adult life,
you know, and I've lived in very poor communities, you know,
I've taught hundreds of students, you know, classes on inequality
and poverty. But I just had this conviction, this nagget conviction,
Like if someone stopped me on the street and was like, Okay,
you know, why do we have so much poverty in
American how can we in it? What would be my answer?
(04:25):
You know? And I felt like I didn't really have
an answer, a nail down answer to that. You know.
Tony Morrison always said that she wrote books that she
wanted to read, and for me, this was kind of
like that. I felt I needed this book. I needed,
at least for myself, to get a kind of story
about American poverty down on paper. And so that's what
this attempt is. And it's an attempt to tell the
(04:46):
news story about poverty in America, one that I don't
think has been really told before.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
That question, so what are we supposed to do about it?
Is one of the hardest questions that people like you
and me and even Ben, you know, as a journalist
who has written about public policy and about housing in particular,
like it's always the hardest question to answer because you
we're all so good at diagnosis. We're also good at
(05:11):
laying out the problem. But I really love what you
just said. I love that you said, you know what,
I needed to answer that question for myself first, and
once I figured it out, I needed to answer it
in such a way that everyone could understand with clarity.
That's really brilliant. I mean, the one thing that I
think is really also interesting, Matt, is your own story.
(05:33):
I mean, this is not just a topic you enter
into through the Ivory Tower as an intellectual abstraction, as
you know, someone who's just curious about empirical research and
the answers. You are also someone who tells in this
book your own struggle with family poverty. Tell us a
little bit about what that was like for you growing
up in Arizona and elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, I grew up in Winslow, Arizona, which is an
Eagle Song and railroad town, and money was really tight
around our home. We got our gas shut off and
then and we lost our home when I was in college.
There's this old line by Seawreight Mills, a sociologist, that says,
you know, sociology is about making personal problems political. And
(06:18):
I think this is, you know, one of the beautiful
gifts that my discipline can give to the world. You know,
to look at my foreclosure or someone else's eviction say look,
this isn't this isn't on you. You know, there's a
there's a bigger game afoot in a way. And I
think that experiencing poverty myself left me kind of curious
about why, you know, why there's so much poverty in
(06:41):
this land of dollars. And then when I moved to
Milwaukee for the last book, I saw kind of poverty
that I just never had seen before, you know, never
experienced before. That's when I saw like Grandma's living without
heat in the winter, and you know, kids routinely getting evicted.
And I think that further drove that question inside of me.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm interested in how those experiences led you to the
work you do. And also you lot, you write a
lot about race and the ways in your own experience
that you, as a white person could pass for not poor,
and how you thought about that in terms of your work.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
So on the on the first part of the question,
you know, I think one of the things that really
changed my thinking about poverty in Milwaukee was, you know,
I moved into a mobile home park, right and one
of the questions I started with was like, why would
you buy a mobile home park, you know, like, if
you could afford a mobile home park, why would you
buy a mobile home park? And then the landlord opened
(07:40):
up his books to me, you know, and so I
could calculate his bottom line, and I learned that, like,
the landlord of the poorest mobile home park in the
fourth worest city in the country was bringing home over
four hundred thousand dollars a year after expenses, after taxes,
after expenses, and so then I was like, oh, why
wouldn't you buy a mobile home park? And you know,
his tenants were living on social Security and disability, and
(08:03):
so that made me really see poverty in terms of
you know, winners and losers, and I you know, that's
not the kind of story they teach us at places
like the Kennedy School, you know, And so it really
affected me. And and I think that on your second question, Ben's,
(08:23):
that's a complicated question, I feel, and I feel that
the best we can do is just be honest about
our blind spots and our who we are and what
we bring to the table. And I mean, it's not
just the things that everyone talks about, right, like your
race or your gender. It's like how straight your teeth are.
How you talk when someone gets arrested. Do you say
(08:47):
what did he do? Or do you say what they
get him for? Like, these little things really matter on
a day to day basis on the ground, I think too,
and I think the best we can do is just
be be clear about what doors are open and what
doors are shut because of who we are, who you know,
who we are, and what we bring.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
We're going to take a quick break, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about some of those
problems they've motivated you to write this book, and how
endemic and entrenched they are, and they are not by accident.
We'll be right back after the break. Welcome back to
(09:29):
some of my best friends. Are We are talking with
Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty Comma by America Today. This
is an incredibly rich and powerful book, Matthew. And let's
talk about the actual problem of poverty, something that most
(09:49):
politicians don't actually talk about. Surprisingly, and so I'm just
going to throw some of your own stats out just
for our listeners. There's thirty eight million people living without
enough food and a decent place to live. One hundred
and eight million people who live a little bit better,
but live on less than fifty five thousand dollars a year.
I'm pretty sure most of our listeners understand what that means.
(10:12):
One million homeless public school children and two million people
in the United States of America without running water or.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Toilet in there.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
So this is just a slice of the problem. Tell
us why is it that America has so many poor
people when it is, in fact the richest country in
the world. What has caused this?
Speaker 1 (10:34):
We've caused this, and by we, I'd like to challenge
all of us to ride ourselves into that we. You know,
often when we talk about we or the who's to blame,
it's always the other political party, that guy that's a
little richer than us. But a lot of us benefit
from poverty. This is by design. You know. Many of
(10:55):
us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce.
Many of us are the shareholders of shareholder capitalism, you know,
don't we benefit when we see our returns coming back
or our pensions grow, and when that comes at a
human sacrifice. The welfare states imbalanced. You know, we give
the most to families that need it the least, especially
in lucrative tax ride offs. And then we have the
(11:17):
audacity to claim we can't afford to do more.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Okay, so let's break it down. Let's talk about the
tax system. For example, how is it that, as you
write in the book, middle to upper income people receive
more public benefits call it welfare or tax benefits or
tax breaks than poor people by the numbers? How does
(11:39):
this work?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
All? Right? So a lot of us have a hard
time seeing a tax break like a welfare check, which
makes sense, that's kind of how our brains work. But
you know, a tax break and a welfare check they
cost the government money, they both contribute to the deficit,
and they both put money in our pocket. So if
we get a tax break because we own a home,
(12:01):
for example, the mortgage interest seduction, we could either receive
that benefit by the government letting us to up the
interest come tag time, or they could just mail us
a check during that time. It's the same difference. So
if we think in those terms and we start adding
up everything the government does for us, every tax break,
(12:24):
every means tested program, every social insurance program, you learn
that the poorest families in America, families in the bottom
twenty percent of income distribution, they get about twenty six
thousand dollars a year from the government, but the richest families,
those in the top twenty percent, receive about thirty five
thousand dollars a year from the government on average. That's
almost a forty percent difference. That's what I'm talking about, right,
(12:47):
That's what we're talking about. It in balanced welfare state.
That's that's how we do more to guard fortunes than
fight poverty.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
You and I both write about housing, and so again
this mortgage interest deduction which you get, you know, I
call it public housing per homows, and we both point
this out. The amount that people get ridden off on
their taxes is greater than the entire amount that goes
to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. So for
actual public housing for poor people, it is significantly greater though.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
By biroductor three. Right. Yeah, So like last year, we
spent about one hundred and ninety billion dollars on homeworner
tax subsidies. Most of that was accrued by families six
six figure incomes. Most white Americans are homeowners and most
Black and LATINX families are not. Because of our systematic
dispossession of people of color from the land and that
(13:40):
same year we only spend about fifty three billion dollars
on direct housing assistance to the needy. So you're right,
you know, it's hard to think of a policy that
does a better job of amplifying our economic and racial
inequality than our housing policy does.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Okay, So I'm going to imagine myself right now in
this conversation as a public policy wonk who comes out
of the conservative side of the equation. So, why isn't
it the case that people who have earned their money
and bought a home and are already being taxed by
(14:14):
state and local governments entitled to receive a portion of
their investment in the community back, unlike people who haven't
worked hard enough to do the same thing and now
need a handout from the government in the form of
a voucher for housing or for access to a public
housing apartment.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So I think that we should want to live in
a country that rewards hard work, and I think that
no one's arguing that it shouldn't be rewarded. The mortgage
interes seduction doesn't do anything to help people get into
home ownership. It just makes homes more valuable than they
should be. Home ownership doesn't lead to financial security, leads
(14:56):
to more financial security, and in part because it's massively
government subsidized. I think it's really hard to look at
folks that can't stand up straight because they've been picking
our berries for years, in years of years, or you know,
maids with chemical burdens on their arms, and tell them
to work harder and work more. I think there's so
(15:16):
many people working and working and working below the poverty
line and can't get ahead. And one of the reasons
they can't get ahead is because we as a nation
are spending so much more on families that don't need
our help.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
M wow, Yeah, that was that was really tough playing
that guy. So, so what you're saying, so what you.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
So?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So what you're what you're saying is the people who
can actually afford to buy a home should just pay
for the cost of their home period And why should
we give them money back?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah? I mean, and if there wasn't like an eviction crisis,
if we weren't facing a housing crisis of like historic proportions,
if most poor renting families then it's been at least
half of their income on housing costs, I don't think
i'd lose a lot of sleep at night right over
the mortgage just production. But that's not the American we
live in. We live in America where we got over
a million homeless public school kids, right, where an eviction
(16:11):
goes out every seven seconds, you know, where one in
four families below the poverty line who are renting or
paying over seventy percent of their income on housing costs. Right,
and we have public housing waiting lists that are stretching
into decades, right, not years, decades. And so then we
run into this normal and I khalil, you hear this
(16:32):
all the time, the house of the Kennedy School, this boring, pernicious, like, well,
you know, how can we afford it? How can we
afford to do more?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And for me can help these people make better choices?
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Right?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, that's the other that's the other part of it.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
By the way. Yeah, by the way, no one's asking
me what I'm doing with my mortgage intra seduction savings, right,
No one's up in my business. No one's asking me
if I'm drinking it or smoking it, you know, or
if I'm going to Vegas with it. But you know,
the level of scrutiny over over these kind of benefits
for the very poorest families. Just should I think should
trive us a shame.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah, And I just want to add one more point
to this, and that is that we pretend that we
live in a world that the economic system known as
capitalism isn't by definition a pyramid scheme where most people
will work at the bottom of this economic system in
order to do the things, provide the services, make the
(17:30):
goods that we all need to live off on, literally
to harvest the fruits and vegetables that we eat, to
mill the timber that builds our homes, to drive the
buses for those of us who do take public transportation,
or to get our kids to school. We pretend as
if the system isn't by definition dependent on those people.
(17:51):
And so you spend a lot of time in this
book actually talking about like, since we know we need
people to do these jobs, we ought to care enough
about them to have a decent quality of life that
we should not be exploiting them through our labor systems,
or exploiting them in the housing market, or exploiting them
in terms of banking and access to credit.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, and I think we should use that word exploitation
for me, it's just like, look, I mean, we've all
been exploited, we've all been in a position where we
don't get a lot of choice, and you got to
you gotta pay the piper. You're stuck in a hotel
and you're going to pay you know, fifty ads for
breakfast or whatever. But that's that defines the lives of
the poor, right, just no choice and because of that,
(18:32):
having to accept a bad option, not because they didn't
make a financially wise decision, but because there's no other
decision to be made, right, there's no other option on
the table. And for me, this point is really crucial
because the way we talk about poverty so much, it's
so abstract. Right, It's about policy, it's about history, it's
about structure, and I think we need to start talking
(18:53):
about it in really personal terms. I was given this
talk the other day and a lot of folks in
the audience were basically, well, what about them? What do
I do with my heart? Uncle?
Speaker 3 (19:03):
You know?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
What do we do with the Republican Party? What do
you know? And it's like, look, if we just if
we did the stuff in our own lives, I think
that would be enough. That would be a start.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
So, yeah, a question I want to ask you, Matt,
because you know, this is an endemic problem for the
history of the United States, but it's got way way
worse than say, the last thirty years, and we have
the divide between rich and poor, the number of poor people.
What's happened in those last thirty years that has made
(19:34):
this much worse.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
So this is give me a little give me a
little room on this question. So I think this is
a really super complicated question, and it's one that's it's
about a paradox. Then we got to lean into the paradox.
So here's the paradox. The paradox is, over the last
fifty years, the poverty rate, by a lot of measures
hasn't shown a lot of improvement. So you can look
(19:57):
at a poverty rate called the supplemental Poverty measure that
does a pretty good job of counting government spending but
also regional housing costs. You know, fifty years ago, in
nineteen seventy three, it was about fifteen percent right before
co with fifteen percent. Some years it went up, some
years went down, but not a ton of progress. And
the reason that's weird is because government spending on poverty
programs is actually increased by a lot over that time,
(20:20):
so increasing.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I know, that's really counterintuitive, and it's certainly a lot
of people I know have argued the opposite.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Right, and so, and it makes sense to argue the
opposite because it feels that if you don't, you're saying
those programs don't work. And that's not what I'm saying,
right emphatically, I'm saying, Gosh, those programs work. And there's
amount of evidence showing that housing systems, food systems are
just essential and effective, and yet poverty persists, and by
(20:46):
a lot of measures, been is right. You know, fiction
filings are up twenty two percent over the last twenty years,
and of our families visiting food pantries up nineteen percent
or last twenty years. So some very troubling signs on
the horizon. And for me, the way to reconcile this
paradox is to face the fact that the fundamentals of
(21:06):
American society are breaking down for long of families, especially
in the job market and in the housing market. So
real wages have declined. If you're a guy without a
college degree, you make less today than you would fifty
years ago. Adjusting for inflation.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
There's been a total disintegration of unions, which accounts for
a bunch of the.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Huge point, right, And now our wages increase only about
point three percent a year in real terms, and so
that means the government is kind of having to spend
more to stay in the same place because our jobs
have got a lot a lot worse, and we haven't
addressed this kind of unrelenting exploitation of the poor in
the labor market. And so I think that that's an
(21:47):
incredibly important point because it leads to this realization that
we don't just need to turn the faucet on more.
We need deeper investments, but we also need different ones.
We need ways to address exploitation in the housing, financial
and labor markets.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, you also say, Matt, that the faucets are on,
but a large portion of subsidies for the poor don't
actually reach them. So so they're they're sort of on,
but they're spraying all over the place.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, yes, nice, I like that a gossip drum or
or there's folks with their their their cups above the water.
Yeah in a way.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
That the story about welfare cash welfare tanaff temporary assistant
for needy families. This is like where it gets maddening, right,
because for every dollar budgeted for cash welfare, only twenty
two cents lands in the pocket of a poor family
because states do all sports. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's
not just a red state, blue state thing, right, it's
all over the country.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah. You know why is that?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, the program is issued through something called the block ground,
as you know, and that's just a wonky way of saying, hey, states,
here's some money, use your discretion about how to spend it.
And man, they do, right, they spend ten f dollars
welfare dollars on Christian summer camps as in it's only training,
or they don't. They just don't spend it, you know.
Like Hawaii is sitting on so much unspent welfare money
(23:08):
they could give every kid in the state ten thousand
dollars below the poverty line. So what we're talking about,
right when we're talking about this, we're talking about there's
poor kids by the millions that aren't good enough to
eat because of this, right, Like, that's that's what we're
talking about, right, We're talking about And you both have
been to a viction court Man, it's just like we're
talking about. You walk into a viction court basically anywhere
(23:30):
in the country, and you see a ton of kids
running around, right, and so it's just like, you know,
this is that's what we're talking about when we're talking
about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Matt. You had said in Hawaii they could give ten
thousand dollars to each kid. They have so much They
have so much money for poverty saved up. We want
to take a quick break and talk more about that,
about solutions, and also about direct payments to people. We're
(24:10):
eager to talk to you and talk to one another
really about guaranteed income as a possible solution.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
To also known as universal basic income.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Universal based income, which is the idea that you give
direct cash payments to people who qualify, and it's become
kind of popular. So Colorado just became the ninth state
with some form of guaranteed income, but numerous cities and
municipalities are already doing this, at least in sort of
like pilot programs. Chicago, Stockton, California, Newark, New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, Patterson,
(24:43):
New Jersey, Cambridge, San Francisco. It's all over the place,
and I want maybe the three of us can talk
about what works and what doesn't work about these direct payments,
about guaranteed income, and you know, what should we learn
about it in terms of combating the poverty problem.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And I'll just add, Matt as you as you gear
up for that, that I mean, we, you and me
come out of a social sigen in space where every
smart person, usually a guy in the room, usually a
white guy, has the perfect solution for our four hundred
year old problem. Right Like, there's no historical context, there's
(25:26):
no irrationality, you know, there's only like here it is
and you know I've done it, the random controlled trial
has proved it, so let's do it all right. So
this seems to me to at least be one of
these ideas that is happening in the country right now.
And I know, for example, here in Newark, Mayor ros
Baraka has been doing this for two years. He has
(25:48):
two hundred participants who receive two hundred and fifty dollars
bi weekly over two year period which will end soon
this September of twenty twenty three. Or another group of
two hundred participants who get three thousand dollars four times
over the past two years, so two different models of distribution,
two year period, four hundred people chosen by lottery. So
(26:11):
the results aren't in yet, but this is just one
example of many that been talked about. So what do
you think about this?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, I'd love to hear both of your takes on this.
I'll give you a on the pro side, and then
I'll give you some of my concerns or some caution
on the pro side. I think that during COVID, we
had this national experiment in universal basic income, actually through
the child tax Credit, right, So, child tax credit was huge.
(26:39):
It went out to tens of millions of families, both
middle and low income families received the credit. What are
it do at cut child poverty by forty six percent
in six months? Right? Six months? Yeah? Remarkable, remarkable, historic, incredible,
we had we had a different country for a moment there.
I think the lessons from the child Tax Credit with
(27:02):
respect to this conversation is lower the administrative burden, get
the checks out, get them out to a lot of folks,
and make the checks meaningful, you know, make the stipend meaningful.
One of the reasons I think we see from some
universal basic income experience fairly modest or you know, not
really great results is because it's too small. Amount of
(27:24):
money is too small, you know, poverty is too deep.
Child attack Shutter took it on boom massively good result.
The hesitation or one hesitation I have about guarantee cash income,
it's just it's often talked about is like the only
thing you need to do, you know. It's like, if
we just did this, and what we saw during COVID
(27:45):
wasn't just massive declines in poverty, but massive surgeons in rents.
Rents went up highest on record a nationwide. And so
I think maybe just because I'm a housing guy, come
at this often through through focusing on the housing crisis,
where it's like, if we don't figure out exploitation, if
we don't address that in all sorts of different realms,
(28:06):
then these kind of policies can be watered down pretty
quickly when markets catch up to the benefit, you know.
And so I think that you know, if we if
we want to approach you BA and guarantee basic income,
I would be totally down to have that conversation as
a piece of a piece of the menu, a piece
of the solution, but not the only solution.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Where are you guys, I've been very I've been very
interested in it because you know, the idea that we
have to change our values in some way, right like
we we have such backlash when it comes to any
program for the poor. And it's been interesting why UBI
sort of attracts a wider range of politics, you know,
(28:47):
so that it's you know, we have all these states
and cities doing it, and there's something I guess about
the universal aspect of it that it goes to everybody,
and so you know, everyone can benefit. And you point
this out mat in the book that that's also what
makes it somewhat untenable because or at least, you know,
it's not as productive as it could be because the
money is going to a lot of people that don't
(29:08):
need it, and that just you know, inflates the cost
so much. Khalil, have you thought about this about why
why guaranteed income is a little more palatable to people.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I'm not sure it is. I mean, my read on
the situation is that at the local level, mayors are
much more innovative and willing to experiment because they're much
more on the hook to their voters. They can't dog
whistle like governors. Can, and so they if they hear
by word of social scientists or the grapevine that there's
(29:43):
something out there that that seems to be working, they're
going to follow it. That's my take on it in
terms of its appeal. I'm more interested, though, in the
bigger issue, and this is an issue you keep coming
back to, whether it's UBI or whether it's the stimulus
checks that came with the COVID pandemic, is that we
(30:04):
have not chosen to solve for the fundamental problem of
poverty in the first place, and that most anti poverty
measures are essentially essentially plugging a hole in a leaky bucket.
So the extent to which we want to actually address
the big issues that create poverty in the first place,
(30:26):
UBI is probably not going to get us there.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But that's probably part of its appeal. Right, you can
just send checks and not have to do this other stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
I think that's right. It's almost like, you know, sometimes
you hear what about education, Could we educate our way
out of this? And I think we all care about education,
but you know, we can't. We can't. We've actually got
a lot more educated last fifty years and a lot
more unequal, but that argument has that similar kind of
appeal where it's kind of like you don't have to
(30:54):
change the terms of the debate. I would love the
UBI conversation to be more of a conversation about tax fairness.
You know, if we're actually going to go down this road,
we do need to pay for in a serious way.
And if we're losing over trillion dollars a year in
tax avoidance in evasion, which we are, then there's no
way we could do big, ambitious things like guaranteed basic income.
(31:15):
So I think there is a conversation amongst the UBI
crowd which just kind of doesn't care about that. You know,
it's like it's about modern monetary theory and it's about
who cares about the deficit. But I mean, if you're
balancing a budget, if you're in any kind of state, local,
federal government, you got to care about that.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
I want to hit on something that you said just
a moment ago about about the stimulus packages during COVID
in the Cares Act, because this was like, this was
such a success story for big government. I mean, this
is incredible. There were three point three million people who
filed for unemployment and checks were sent out and it
(31:53):
was a it was a mix of things, as you say,
Like it wasn't just direct payments. It was also rental assistance.
There was also some child tax credits, and the child
poverty rate was cut in half. We had sixteen million
fewer people in poverty. That is like, you know, historic
in the United States. I mean, this is like new
Deal stuff. And the question, or like what I want
(32:17):
I've been thinking a lot about, is why even people
like us haven't been talking about this constantly. Why did
this sort of just like you know, peter out. And
I know, I know some of that is about inflation
and people are worried about like the price of eggs
and gasoline. But this has did not become a rallying
cry for the Democrats. This did not become an example
(32:39):
that people are pointing to. I mean, for a lot
of people who are listening to this, this will be
the first time that they've heard this. You know, what
does that even say about about the kind of hurdles
we have to overcome to to sort of engage any
of these programs have this huge, massive success in our
in recent years, in the last two or three years,
and that's not even a talking.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Aboutint I love the way that you asked the question
because you asked it about us, and I think that's
the exact way to ask the question. It's not just
about the other political party, and it's not just about
that one senator from West Virginia that voted the other way.
You know, it's about us, Like, did we pick up
the phone, you know, do we call our congress people.
(33:20):
We're we out in the streets about this, We're rewriting
editorials about this. And there was this passive silence from
the progressive left in America on this. I think that
diagnosing that problem is really, really key. I was with
Heather McGee a few weeks.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Ago, the author of the Some of Us author.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Beautiful thank you for the pro Yes, Yeah, and her
diagnosis was, you know, the progressive movement, especially among young people,
are really hesitant to throw Biden a bone because they
were hoping for a different kind of candidate, different kind
of policy. But in their silence, you know, all lawmakers
(34:03):
learn that they can spend a ton of political capital,
do all this good, and get not a lot of
returns from it, you know, in terms of political success,
And so poor families in the future are going to
pay for our silence.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
And you know what's interesting on that point, Matt, I
have I have two I have one different opinion in
one to add to this failure of blaring the good
news of what happened with the COVID stimulus money and
its impact on lower and poverty. One is that I
actually think that the problem of inflation became an economic
(34:44):
political problem for the Democrats. And rather than saying young progressives,
who frankly don't think drive much news coverage, particularly in
the page of the New York Times of the Washington Post,
what does drive a lot of news coverage is median voters,
Democrats in particular, since Republican Party has gone all crazy
and so that's you know, it's a different kind of voter.
(35:06):
And for those median Democratic voters, not only is inflation real,
meaning their cost were driven up, but this question of
whether or not we need to get back to something
that was, like you know, Obama friendly, an economy that
worked then before Donald Trump and before all this COVID madness,
and in some ways inflation became the bugaboo of the
(35:28):
success of the stimulus package, whether or not we can
actually absorb inflation or not, which is a policy debate
separate from this. I think that's what went wrong. That
political liability and risk to what carrying the water for
inflation during this moment, I think contributed to the lack
of like celebrating the stimulus packages and Khalid.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
That's inherent to the democratic message. What you just said
that if you think of Biden or Obama, they're always
speaking to the middle class, right, and inflation is a
middle class problem. They don't want to speak about poor people.
They don't say these tax cuts will benefit the poor.
And when you talk like that for thirty years, you know,
(36:12):
then then an issue like this comes up, a success story,
and you can't own it because they haven't. They don't
have that language. They're gonna always focus on the middle class.
And it's like it's like they shot themselves in the
foot as they're as they're doing this.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
I think that you're right that that that narrative shifted.
I think that's that's a huge part of it. You
had a second point too.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second point which gets me also
to a kind of term you adopt. So the second
point is that I think we live in a country
where everyone is socialized to despise poor people, including poor
people that they the politics of on deserving, this of individualism,
(36:57):
of meritocracy, of what we used to call social Darwinism,
which is a version of basically saying, you know, if
you're poor, you you deserve to be poor because you're
not good enough to either biologically, culturally fill in the blank.
And I think that spirit is alive and well in America.
I think it has been cultivated since Reagan took office
(37:18):
after the nineteen sixties, which was an exceptional period for
redefining our values, even if we didn't fully get there.
And I will say, in my own social networks, and
I'm not going to name any names, I heard more
than a few stories of people saying, yeah, you know,
look at those poor people getting those checks and look
at what they're doing with that money. Whether it was
(37:41):
true or not, it didn't matter. What mattered is that
poor people are not to be trusted, they're not good people,
and we should we shouldn't encourage the dependency that comes
with it. These are all things that every American listening
to me right now knows fully well. But being honest
(38:02):
about the scale of that sentiment, that ideology that exists
in our society. I think is a problem that your
book tries to address by giving a new term, at
least to yourself, this notion of a poverty abolitionist, this
idea that listen, we actually have to commit ourselves to
ending poverty and it's not going to be solved by
(38:22):
fixing poor people.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Right. There's this line in the book by Tommy ORNs,
the novelist that I just love, where he says, these
kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings,
falling to their deaths, and we think that the problem
is that they're jumping, and we have to find ways
of telling the story about the fire. You know, who
lit it, who's warming their hands by it. And I
(38:46):
think we have to have this reflex where every time
someone goes down that road, or goes down the scarcity
mindset road, the idea that we can't afford to do more.
I think we just have to have this narrative, rhetorical
reflex we're pushing back constantly, and for me, the idea
of a poverty abolitionism is a conviction, a commitment that
(39:08):
shares with other abolitionist movements, the belief that poverty is
an abomination. It's not something we have to live with.
It's not something that we should want to reduce, it's
something we should want to end. And I think that
it shares with other abolitionist movements, like the movement to
abolished lavery of the prison, the recognition that profiting from
(39:28):
someone else's paying corrupts all of us. And I think
that when we take this on as an identity, it
becomes personal and political. It means shopping differently, investing differently,
living differently, flexing our influence and wherever we have it
in the spirit of divesting from poverty. And I think
that this is kind of how we change the common sense.
(39:52):
But we all have to have some skin in the game,
I think, and not just keep kicking the can down
the road and putting it on whoever that uncle that
comes to Thanksgiving, or that one relative or the guy
down the hall or the other political party, that start
really taking some ownership over this in our own lives.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
You use this term by Seawright Mills along the way
that you call that he coined, and you use here
structural immorality that fundamentally we have a society that was
built on immoral premises. You know, we don't have to
go down the road of the indigenous land that was
stolen or the enslaved bodies, but that the ongoing way
(40:33):
in which freedom in America also means the freedom to exploit,
to take as much as possible, and then to blame
people for their own misery as a result of that process.
You even use the term at some point you're like,
if this isn't gas lighting, I don't know what it is, right.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Right, And a lot of us just just trying to
live find ourselves morally compromised traditions and relationships, right, And
so I think that I love this term structural immorality
because it recognizes that, like, look, you know, this is
hard for all of us. We're all kind of hard
in us. But we can start investing day by day.
And so I think that finding ways to personalize this,
(41:10):
I feel like it's important for building that political will.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Listen, you make really clear here in this book that
the cost of solving poverty, of ending poverty, of abolishing
poverty means that we all have to bear some cost
for doing that, and all of this bs in our
talking points that we hear in the public policy debate.
(41:35):
We all win with equity, we all win. Everybody can
be rich is bullshit. It is bullshit. In order for
the people living in East Hoorn next to me, which
is on average a more working class community than the
affluence South Orange that I live in, either my taxes
are going to have to go up to help subsidize
their needs, or the price of my home is going
(41:58):
to have to come down so that more of them
can afford to live in this community, either through single
family units or affordable housing. Either way, something has to change,
and I'm going to have to give up something in
order for that change to happen. I just want to
end this conversation with that recognition, because we cannot keep
(42:18):
believing that solving for an economic system built for exploitation
means that we can all be good people and bear
no burden or cost for change.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Right. I think that those of us that have found
economic security and privilege will have to take less from
the government. We will have to start benefiting less from
government largess. But what we get from that bargain is
a better country. We get a safer country, we get
a healthier country, we get a freer country. We get
(42:49):
a country where we don't have to worry about our
kids so much. We get a country that lives up
to its stated values and its higher his highest angels,
you know, in highest values. So I think that you're right.
It is a lie to swallow these everyone and wins arguments.
But I do think that there are costs that we're
(43:13):
bearing now as a country by tolerating all this desperation
and depravity around us. And there's going to be cost
to unwinding ourselves from the addiction of poverty. But those
are the costs that I'm totally willing to bear. I
want to live in that country.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Matt. You are so intelligent, and you're also so thoughtful
and caring. I mean, it's a thing that I think
is in It's rare and amazing, and it comes through
in your writing and it obviously comes through and speaking
with you.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
So thank you well your work and Khalil's your work
has meant so much to me over the years, and
your friendship and collegialship, and thank you so much for
everything you do out in the world. So it's been
a real honor, you know, just to be in conversation
with you all, and I hope we can do it
in person soon.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Thanks so much Matt for joining us today on some
of our best friends are thanks us. What a good conversation.
I learned a lot man. But you know, Ben, something
that really struck me talking to him when he said
that a mobile home park owner makes four hundred thousand
(44:21):
dollars profit off of backs of poor people in Milwaukee, Like,
I was like, damn, that's that's a lot of bread
and it. You know, we often like think that people
who are renting these places are doing like public service,
you know, to some degree, because these are really shitty places,
whether it's a mobile home park or some slumlord in
(44:42):
the Bronx. But no, what he's really saying is that
they are holding the line on their costs to create
decent places of living so that they can make as
much money as possible off the poorest people.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean this is the work that I've
done on housing too, and why we need government in
these roles because the private market is never going to
deliver this fairly. Yeah, that's what we learn over and
over and over again.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah. And then government with like direct cash assistance, you know,
you end up with twenty two cents in the pocket
of poor person and the rich people are getting mortgage deductions.
It is so much so yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, I mean so for me and all of that.
Then hearing him talk about poverty abolition, which is not
something I had heard about before this book and before
this conversation, is like, I like that. It makes me
think about it in terms of prison abolition and about
mass incarceration, because when I think about mass incarceration, I
think about these fifty years and that we're living in
(45:37):
this status quo which is is not normal. It's an aberrations,
it's punishing, and we can't accept it as normal. And
that's what I think poverty abolition does too. Like the
way we're living now, we can't accept this, you know,
the air we're breathing, and so it is that kind
of call to action. It is involves all of us,
(46:00):
and so yeah, I think that phrase should be used more.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, you just said something that
I hadn't thought about when we talked to Matt. But
it just echoes your point really clearly. The fact of
mass incarceration, as a lot of prison abolitionists will say,
is a consequence of the way that poor people were
abandoned by the state. Yea connected they're connected. Yeah, so
(46:24):
it's the right approach to solving both problems. So we
got work to do. I don't know about you, but
I'm on it. I am on it. First responder poverty, abolitionism,
signing me up, love you, Love you too. Some of
(46:45):
My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries.
The show is written and hosted by me Khalil Dubron
Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nicks with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardot.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Pushkin thanks to Leital Mollad, Julia Barton, Heather Fain, Carly Migliori,
John schnarz Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website Averyaryong
dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
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Speaker 3 (47:45):
And if you like our show, please give us a
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you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it.
Speaker 4 (47:55):
Thank you, it's so good to see you both wished
the podcast for like eight hours long.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
I like that our editors would hate that.
Pushing.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I'm Ben Austen. We are two best friends, one black,
one white.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
some of my best friends are.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Some of my best friends are in this show. We
wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply
divided and unequal country.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Today on the show we have the sociologist Matthew Desmond.
He is the author of a new book called Poverty
by America. Yes, an exploration of the United States, the
richest country in the world that has tremendous guard at
you in poverty. This book is a call to action,
and this problem is on all of us to understand
(01:15):
and work to fix.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Man. We are so happy to have matt on the show.
He studies and writes about what I also write about,
which is housing. His last book, Evicted, Poverty and Profit
in the American City, won a Pulitzer Prize. Yeah you'll
pin baby, Dad is coming.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Matthew Desmond. It is so wonderful to welcome you to
some of my best friends are.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
It's great to see you too. Thank you so much
for having.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Me and matt We got to see each other in
Chicago just a couple months ago while you're on your
book tour, and it was amazing to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Then, well, I've been living with your ideas for a
while because I just read your new book that's coming
out soon and loved it. I can't wait to see
it out in the world. And congratulations on that. And
what an incredible accomplishment. Band man, it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
It has this very prideful smirk on his face.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
I'm ready to be like I just dropped the recorder.
I'm like, done, done deal.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
In case you the listener, were wondering, yes, correction will
be at a bookstore near you soon, so listen. You
and I met each other at Harvard several years ago
when I joined the Kennedy School faculty, and we became
close friends. At the time, we were part of a
community of folks, including Diva Pager, to whom you dedicate
(02:43):
this book, a fear sociologist who helped us understand just
how pervasive structural racism and biases in our labor markets.
And I just got to tell you, you know, my
time at Harvard has never been the same since you left, man,
you abandoned me for Princeton, Like what a year later? Like,
what's up with that? We haven't really talked about this,
(03:03):
but I just need you to know I haven't been
happy since you left.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It was personal. I have to say, I miss the event,
I miss you, I miss our talks, I miss running
into you and our coffees and our and our beers.
And you know, Diva was such a powerful spiritual and
intellectual force in my life. And you know, she passed away,
(03:27):
as you know, too young, and a lot of her
energy and her spirit I hope to a channel in
this book and this work. So she was the best
of us. And thank you for opening up that conversation
with her memory.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, Matt. So, as you say,
we are the richest country in the world. It's crazy,
and yet we have more poverty, more poor people than
any other developed country. That's that's our story. And I
wanted to ask you about the writing of this book,
(03:59):
why this topic, Why focus on poverty.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Well, I've been working on poverty all of my adult life,
you know, and I've lived in very poor communities, you know,
I've taught hundreds of students, you know, classes on inequality
and poverty. But I just had this conviction, this nagget conviction,
Like if someone stopped me on the street and was like, Okay,
you know, why do we have so much poverty in
American how can we in it? What would be my answer?
(04:25):
You know? And I felt like I didn't really have
an answer, a nail down answer to that. You know.
Tony Morrison always said that she wrote books that she
wanted to read, and for me, this was kind of
like that. I felt I needed this book. I needed,
at least for myself, to get a kind of story
about American poverty down on paper. And so that's what
this attempt is. And it's an attempt to tell the
(04:46):
news story about poverty in America, one that I don't
think has been really told before.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
That question, so what are we supposed to do about it?
Is one of the hardest questions that people like you
and me and even Ben, you know, as a journalist
who has written about public policy and about housing in particular,
like it's always the hardest question to answer because you
we're all so good at diagnosis. We're also good at
(05:11):
laying out the problem. But I really love what you
just said. I love that you said, you know what,
I needed to answer that question for myself first, and
once I figured it out, I needed to answer it
in such a way that everyone could understand with clarity.
That's really brilliant. I mean, the one thing that I
think is really also interesting, Matt, is your own story.
(05:33):
I mean, this is not just a topic you enter
into through the Ivory Tower as an intellectual abstraction, as
you know, someone who's just curious about empirical research and
the answers. You are also someone who tells in this
book your own struggle with family poverty. Tell us a
little bit about what that was like for you growing
up in Arizona and elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, I grew up in Winslow, Arizona, which is an
Eagle Song and railroad town, and money was really tight
around our home. We got our gas shut off and
then and we lost our home when I was in college.
There's this old line by Seawreight Mills, a sociologist, that says,
you know, sociology is about making personal problems political. And
(06:18):
I think this is, you know, one of the beautiful
gifts that my discipline can give to the world. You know,
to look at my foreclosure or someone else's eviction say look,
this isn't this isn't on you. You know, there's a
there's a bigger game afoot in a way. And I
think that experiencing poverty myself left me kind of curious
about why, you know, why there's so much poverty in
(06:41):
this land of dollars. And then when I moved to
Milwaukee for the last book, I saw kind of poverty
that I just never had seen before, you know, never
experienced before. That's when I saw like Grandma's living without
heat in the winter, and you know, kids routinely getting evicted.
And I think that further drove that question inside of me.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm interested in how those experiences led you to the
work you do. And also you lot, you write a
lot about race and the ways in your own experience
that you, as a white person could pass for not poor,
and how you thought about that in terms of your work.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
So on the on the first part of the question,
you know, I think one of the things that really
changed my thinking about poverty in Milwaukee was, you know,
I moved into a mobile home park, right and one
of the questions I started with was like, why would
you buy a mobile home park, you know, like, if
you could afford a mobile home park, why would you
buy a mobile home park? And then the landlord opened
(07:40):
up his books to me, you know, and so I
could calculate his bottom line, and I learned that, like,
the landlord of the poorest mobile home park in the
fourth worest city in the country was bringing home over
four hundred thousand dollars a year after expenses, after taxes,
after expenses, and so then I was like, oh, why
wouldn't you buy a mobile home park? And you know,
his tenants were living on social Security and disability, and
(08:03):
so that made me really see poverty in terms of
you know, winners and losers, and I you know, that's
not the kind of story they teach us at places
like the Kennedy School, you know, And so it really
affected me. And and I think that on your second question, Ben's,
(08:23):
that's a complicated question, I feel, and I feel that
the best we can do is just be honest about
our blind spots and our who we are and what
we bring to the table. And I mean, it's not
just the things that everyone talks about, right, like your
race or your gender. It's like how straight your teeth are.
How you talk when someone gets arrested. Do you say
(08:47):
what did he do? Or do you say what they
get him for? Like, these little things really matter on
a day to day basis on the ground, I think too,
and I think the best we can do is just
be be clear about what doors are open and what
doors are shut because of who we are, who you know,
who we are, and what we bring.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
We're going to take a quick break, and when we
get back, we're going to talk about some of those
problems they've motivated you to write this book, and how
endemic and entrenched they are, and they are not by accident.
We'll be right back after the break. Welcome back to
(09:29):
some of my best friends. Are We are talking with
Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty Comma by America Today. This
is an incredibly rich and powerful book, Matthew. And let's
talk about the actual problem of poverty, something that most
(09:49):
politicians don't actually talk about. Surprisingly, and so I'm just
going to throw some of your own stats out just
for our listeners. There's thirty eight million people living without
enough food and a decent place to live. One hundred
and eight million people who live a little bit better,
but live on less than fifty five thousand dollars a year.
I'm pretty sure most of our listeners understand what that means.
(10:12):
One million homeless public school children and two million people
in the United States of America without running water or.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Toilet in there.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
So this is just a slice of the problem. Tell
us why is it that America has so many poor
people when it is, in fact the richest country in
the world. What has caused this?
Speaker 1 (10:34):
We've caused this, and by we, I'd like to challenge
all of us to ride ourselves into that we. You know,
often when we talk about we or the who's to blame,
it's always the other political party, that guy that's a
little richer than us. But a lot of us benefit
from poverty. This is by design. You know. Many of
(10:55):
us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce.
Many of us are the shareholders of shareholder capitalism, you know,
don't we benefit when we see our returns coming back
or our pensions grow, and when that comes at a
human sacrifice. The welfare states imbalanced. You know, we give
the most to families that need it the least, especially
in lucrative tax ride offs. And then we have the
(11:17):
audacity to claim we can't afford to do more.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Okay, so let's break it down. Let's talk about the
tax system. For example, how is it that, as you
write in the book, middle to upper income people receive
more public benefits call it welfare or tax benefits or
tax breaks than poor people by the numbers? How does
(11:39):
this work?
Speaker 1 (11:40):
All? Right? So a lot of us have a hard
time seeing a tax break like a welfare check, which
makes sense, that's kind of how our brains work. But
you know, a tax break and a welfare check they
cost the government money, they both contribute to the deficit,
and they both put money in our pocket. So if
we get a tax break because we own a home,
(12:01):
for example, the mortgage interest seduction, we could either receive
that benefit by the government letting us to up the
interest come tag time, or they could just mail us
a check during that time. It's the same difference. So
if we think in those terms and we start adding
up everything the government does for us, every tax break,
(12:24):
every means tested program, every social insurance program, you learn
that the poorest families in America, families in the bottom
twenty percent of income distribution, they get about twenty six
thousand dollars a year from the government, but the richest families,
those in the top twenty percent, receive about thirty five
thousand dollars a year from the government on average. That's
almost a forty percent difference. That's what I'm talking about, right,
(12:47):
That's what we're talking about. It in balanced welfare state.
That's that's how we do more to guard fortunes than
fight poverty.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
You and I both write about housing, and so again
this mortgage interest deduction which you get, you know, I
call it public housing per homows, and we both point
this out. The amount that people get ridden off on
their taxes is greater than the entire amount that goes
to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. So for
actual public housing for poor people, it is significantly greater though.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
By biroductor three. Right. Yeah, So like last year, we
spent about one hundred and ninety billion dollars on homeworner
tax subsidies. Most of that was accrued by families six
six figure incomes. Most white Americans are homeowners and most
Black and LATINX families are not. Because of our systematic
dispossession of people of color from the land and that
(13:40):
same year we only spend about fifty three billion dollars
on direct housing assistance to the needy. So you're right,
you know, it's hard to think of a policy that
does a better job of amplifying our economic and racial
inequality than our housing policy does.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Okay, So I'm going to imagine myself right now in
this conversation as a public policy wonk who comes out
of the conservative side of the equation. So, why isn't
it the case that people who have earned their money
and bought a home and are already being taxed by
(14:14):
state and local governments entitled to receive a portion of
their investment in the community back, unlike people who haven't
worked hard enough to do the same thing and now
need a handout from the government in the form of
a voucher for housing or for access to a public
housing apartment.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So I think that we should want to live in
a country that rewards hard work, and I think that
no one's arguing that it shouldn't be rewarded. The mortgage
interes seduction doesn't do anything to help people get into
home ownership. It just makes homes more valuable than they
should be. Home ownership doesn't lead to financial security, leads
(14:56):
to more financial security, and in part because it's massively
government subsidized. I think it's really hard to look at
folks that can't stand up straight because they've been picking
our berries for years, in years of years, or you know,
maids with chemical burdens on their arms, and tell them
to work harder and work more. I think there's so
(15:16):
many people working and working and working below the poverty
line and can't get ahead. And one of the reasons
they can't get ahead is because we as a nation
are spending so much more on families that don't need
our help.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
M wow, Yeah, that was that was really tough playing
that guy. So, so what you're saying, so what you.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
So?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So what you're what you're saying is the people who
can actually afford to buy a home should just pay
for the cost of their home period And why should
we give them money back?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah? I mean, and if there wasn't like an eviction crisis,
if we weren't facing a housing crisis of like historic proportions,
if most poor renting families then it's been at least
half of their income on housing costs, I don't think
i'd lose a lot of sleep at night right over
the mortgage just production. But that's not the American we
live in. We live in America where we got over
a million homeless public school kids, right, where an eviction
(16:11):
goes out every seven seconds, you know, where one in
four families below the poverty line who are renting or
paying over seventy percent of their income on housing costs. Right,
and we have public housing waiting lists that are stretching
into decades, right, not years, decades. And so then we
run into this normal and I khalil, you hear this
(16:32):
all the time, the house of the Kennedy School, this boring, pernicious, like, well,
you know, how can we afford it? How can we
afford to do more?
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And for me can help these people make better choices?
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Right?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, that's the other that's the other part of it.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
By the way. Yeah, by the way, no one's asking
me what I'm doing with my mortgage intra seduction savings, right,
No one's up in my business. No one's asking me
if I'm drinking it or smoking it, you know, or
if I'm going to Vegas with it. But you know,
the level of scrutiny over over these kind of benefits
for the very poorest families. Just should I think should
trive us a shame.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah, And I just want to add one more point
to this, and that is that we pretend that we
live in a world that the economic system known as
capitalism isn't by definition a pyramid scheme where most people
will work at the bottom of this economic system in
order to do the things, provide the services, make the
(17:30):
goods that we all need to live off on, literally
to harvest the fruits and vegetables that we eat, to
mill the timber that builds our homes, to drive the
buses for those of us who do take public transportation,
or to get our kids to school. We pretend as
if the system isn't by definition dependent on those people.
(17:51):
And so you spend a lot of time in this
book actually talking about like, since we know we need
people to do these jobs, we ought to care enough
about them to have a decent quality of life that
we should not be exploiting them through our labor systems,
or exploiting them in the housing market, or exploiting them
in terms of banking and access to credit.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, and I think we should use that word exploitation
for me, it's just like, look, I mean, we've all
been exploited, we've all been in a position where we
don't get a lot of choice, and you got to
you gotta pay the piper. You're stuck in a hotel
and you're going to pay you know, fifty ads for
breakfast or whatever. But that's that defines the lives of
the poor, right, just no choice and because of that,
(18:32):
having to accept a bad option, not because they didn't
make a financially wise decision, but because there's no other
decision to be made, right, there's no other option on
the table. And for me, this point is really crucial
because the way we talk about poverty so much, it's
so abstract. Right, It's about policy, it's about history, it's
about structure, and I think we need to start talking
(18:53):
about it in really personal terms. I was given this
talk the other day and a lot of folks in
the audience were basically, well, what about them? What do
I do with my heart? Uncle?
Speaker 3 (19:03):
You know?
Speaker 1 (19:03):
What do we do with the Republican Party? What do
you know? And it's like, look, if we just if
we did the stuff in our own lives, I think
that would be enough. That would be a start.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
So, yeah, a question I want to ask you, Matt,
because you know, this is an endemic problem for the
history of the United States, but it's got way way
worse than say, the last thirty years, and we have
the divide between rich and poor, the number of poor people.
What's happened in those last thirty years that has made
(19:34):
this much worse.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
So this is give me a little give me a
little room on this question. So I think this is
a really super complicated question, and it's one that's it's
about a paradox. Then we got to lean into the paradox.
So here's the paradox. The paradox is, over the last
fifty years, the poverty rate, by a lot of measures
hasn't shown a lot of improvement. So you can look
(19:57):
at a poverty rate called the supplemental Poverty measure that
does a pretty good job of counting government spending but
also regional housing costs. You know, fifty years ago, in
nineteen seventy three, it was about fifteen percent right before
co with fifteen percent. Some years it went up, some
years went down, but not a ton of progress. And
the reason that's weird is because government spending on poverty
programs is actually increased by a lot over that time,
(20:20):
so increasing.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I know, that's really counterintuitive, and it's certainly a lot
of people I know have argued the opposite.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Right, and so, and it makes sense to argue the
opposite because it feels that if you don't, you're saying
those programs don't work. And that's not what I'm saying,
right emphatically, I'm saying, Gosh, those programs work. And there's
amount of evidence showing that housing systems, food systems are
just essential and effective, and yet poverty persists, and by
(20:46):
a lot of measures, been is right. You know, fiction
filings are up twenty two percent over the last twenty years,
and of our families visiting food pantries up nineteen percent
or last twenty years. So some very troubling signs on
the horizon. And for me, the way to reconcile this
paradox is to face the fact that the fundamentals of
(21:06):
American society are breaking down for long of families, especially
in the job market and in the housing market. So
real wages have declined. If you're a guy without a
college degree, you make less today than you would fifty
years ago. Adjusting for inflation.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
There's been a total disintegration of unions, which accounts for
a bunch of the.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Huge point, right, And now our wages increase only about
point three percent a year in real terms, and so
that means the government is kind of having to spend
more to stay in the same place because our jobs
have got a lot a lot worse, and we haven't
addressed this kind of unrelenting exploitation of the poor in
the labor market. And so I think that that's an
(21:47):
incredibly important point because it leads to this realization that
we don't just need to turn the faucet on more.
We need deeper investments, but we also need different ones.
We need ways to address exploitation in the housing, financial
and labor markets.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
Well, you also say, Matt, that the faucets are on,
but a large portion of subsidies for the poor don't
actually reach them. So so they're they're sort of on,
but they're spraying all over the place.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, yes, nice, I like that a gossip drum or
or there's folks with their their their cups above the water.
Yeah in a way.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
That the story about welfare cash welfare tanaff temporary assistant
for needy families. This is like where it gets maddening, right,
because for every dollar budgeted for cash welfare, only twenty
two cents lands in the pocket of a poor family
because states do all sports. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's
not just a red state, blue state thing, right, it's
all over the country.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah. You know why is that?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, the program is issued through something called the block ground,
as you know, and that's just a wonky way of saying, hey, states,
here's some money, use your discretion about how to spend it.
And man, they do, right, they spend ten f dollars
welfare dollars on Christian summer camps as in it's only training,
or they don't. They just don't spend it, you know.
Like Hawaii is sitting on so much unspent welfare money
(23:08):
they could give every kid in the state ten thousand
dollars below the poverty line. So what we're talking about,
right when we're talking about this, we're talking about there's
poor kids by the millions that aren't good enough to
eat because of this, right, Like, that's that's what we're
talking about, right, We're talking about And you both have
been to a viction court Man, it's just like we're
talking about. You walk into a viction court basically anywhere
(23:30):
in the country, and you see a ton of kids
running around, right, and so it's just like, you know,
this is that's what we're talking about when we're talking
about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Matt. You had said in Hawaii they could give ten
thousand dollars to each kid. They have so much They
have so much money for poverty saved up. We want
to take a quick break and talk more about that,
about solutions, and also about direct payments to people. We're
(24:10):
eager to talk to you and talk to one another
really about guaranteed income as a possible solution.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
To also known as universal basic income.
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Universal based income, which is the idea that you give
direct cash payments to people who qualify, and it's become
kind of popular. So Colorado just became the ninth state
with some form of guaranteed income, but numerous cities and
municipalities are already doing this, at least in sort of
like pilot programs. Chicago, Stockton, California, Newark, New Jersey, Gary, Indiana, Patterson,
(24:43):
New Jersey, Cambridge, San Francisco. It's all over the place,
and I want maybe the three of us can talk
about what works and what doesn't work about these direct payments,
about guaranteed income, and you know, what should we learn
about it in terms of combating the poverty problem.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And I'll just add, Matt as you as you gear
up for that, that I mean, we, you and me
come out of a social sigen in space where every
smart person, usually a guy in the room, usually a
white guy, has the perfect solution for our four hundred
year old problem. Right Like, there's no historical context, there's
(25:26):
no irrationality, you know, there's only like here it is
and you know I've done it, the random controlled trial
has proved it, so let's do it all right. So
this seems to me to at least be one of
these ideas that is happening in the country right now.
And I know, for example, here in Newark, Mayor ros
Baraka has been doing this for two years. He has
(25:48):
two hundred participants who receive two hundred and fifty dollars
bi weekly over two year period which will end soon
this September of twenty twenty three. Or another group of
two hundred participants who get three thousand dollars four times
over the past two years, so two different models of distribution,
two year period, four hundred people chosen by lottery. So
(26:11):
the results aren't in yet, but this is just one
example of many that been talked about. So what do
you think about this?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, I'd love to hear both of your takes on this.
I'll give you a on the pro side, and then
I'll give you some of my concerns or some caution
on the pro side. I think that during COVID, we
had this national experiment in universal basic income, actually through
the child tax Credit, right, So, child tax credit was huge.
(26:39):
It went out to tens of millions of families, both
middle and low income families received the credit. What are
it do at cut child poverty by forty six percent
in six months? Right? Six months? Yeah? Remarkable, remarkable, historic, incredible,
we had we had a different country for a moment there.
I think the lessons from the child Tax Credit with
(27:02):
respect to this conversation is lower the administrative burden, get
the checks out, get them out to a lot of folks,
and make the checks meaningful, you know, make the stipend meaningful.
One of the reasons I think we see from some
universal basic income experience fairly modest or you know, not
really great results is because it's too small. Amount of
(27:24):
money is too small, you know, poverty is too deep.
Child attack Shutter took it on boom massively good result.
The hesitation or one hesitation I have about guarantee cash income,
it's just it's often talked about is like the only
thing you need to do, you know. It's like, if
we just did this, and what we saw during COVID
(27:45):
wasn't just massive declines in poverty, but massive surgeons in rents.
Rents went up highest on record a nationwide. And so
I think maybe just because I'm a housing guy, come
at this often through through focusing on the housing crisis,
where it's like, if we don't figure out exploitation, if
we don't address that in all sorts of different realms,
(28:06):
then these kind of policies can be watered down pretty
quickly when markets catch up to the benefit, you know.
And so I think that you know, if we if
we want to approach you BA and guarantee basic income,
I would be totally down to have that conversation as
a piece of a piece of the menu, a piece
of the solution, but not the only solution.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Where are you guys, I've been very I've been very
interested in it because you know, the idea that we
have to change our values in some way, right like
we we have such backlash when it comes to any
program for the poor. And it's been interesting why UBI
sort of attracts a wider range of politics, you know,
(28:47):
so that it's you know, we have all these states
and cities doing it, and there's something I guess about
the universal aspect of it that it goes to everybody,
and so you know, everyone can benefit. And you point
this out mat in the book that that's also what
makes it somewhat untenable because or at least, you know,
it's not as productive as it could be because the
money is going to a lot of people that don't
(29:08):
need it, and that just you know, inflates the cost
so much. Khalil, have you thought about this about why
why guaranteed income is a little more palatable to people.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
I'm not sure it is. I mean, my read on
the situation is that at the local level, mayors are
much more innovative and willing to experiment because they're much
more on the hook to their voters. They can't dog
whistle like governors. Can, and so they if they hear
by word of social scientists or the grapevine that there's
(29:43):
something out there that that seems to be working, they're
going to follow it. That's my take on it in
terms of its appeal. I'm more interested, though, in the
bigger issue, and this is an issue you keep coming
back to, whether it's UBI or whether it's the stimulus
checks that came with the COVID pandemic, is that we
(30:04):
have not chosen to solve for the fundamental problem of
poverty in the first place, and that most anti poverty
measures are essentially essentially plugging a hole in a leaky bucket.
So the extent to which we want to actually address
the big issues that create poverty in the first place,
(30:26):
UBI is probably not going to get us there.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
But that's probably part of its appeal. Right, you can
just send checks and not have to do this other stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
I think that's right. It's almost like, you know, sometimes
you hear what about education, Could we educate our way
out of this? And I think we all care about education,
but you know, we can't. We can't. We've actually got
a lot more educated last fifty years and a lot
more unequal, but that argument has that similar kind of
appeal where it's kind of like you don't have to
(30:54):
change the terms of the debate. I would love the
UBI conversation to be more of a conversation about tax fairness.
You know, if we're actually going to go down this road,
we do need to pay for in a serious way.
And if we're losing over trillion dollars a year in
tax avoidance in evasion, which we are, then there's no
way we could do big, ambitious things like guaranteed basic income.
(31:15):
So I think there is a conversation amongst the UBI
crowd which just kind of doesn't care about that. You know,
it's like it's about modern monetary theory and it's about
who cares about the deficit. But I mean, if you're
balancing a budget, if you're in any kind of state, local,
federal government, you got to care about that.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
I want to hit on something that you said just
a moment ago about about the stimulus packages during COVID
in the Cares Act, because this was like, this was
such a success story for big government. I mean, this
is incredible. There were three point three million people who
filed for unemployment and checks were sent out and it
(31:53):
was a it was a mix of things, as you say,
Like it wasn't just direct payments. It was also rental assistance.
There was also some child tax credits, and the child
poverty rate was cut in half. We had sixteen million
fewer people in poverty. That is like, you know, historic
in the United States. I mean, this is like new
Deal stuff. And the question, or like what I want
(32:17):
I've been thinking a lot about, is why even people
like us haven't been talking about this constantly. Why did
this sort of just like you know, peter out. And
I know, I know some of that is about inflation
and people are worried about like the price of eggs
and gasoline. But this has did not become a rallying
cry for the Democrats. This did not become an example
(32:39):
that people are pointing to. I mean, for a lot
of people who are listening to this, this will be
the first time that they've heard this. You know, what
does that even say about about the kind of hurdles
we have to overcome to to sort of engage any
of these programs have this huge, massive success in our
in recent years, in the last two or three years,
and that's not even a talking.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Aboutint I love the way that you asked the question
because you asked it about us, and I think that's
the exact way to ask the question. It's not just
about the other political party, and it's not just about
that one senator from West Virginia that voted the other way.
You know, it's about us, Like, did we pick up
the phone, you know, do we call our congress people.
(33:20):
We're we out in the streets about this, We're rewriting
editorials about this. And there was this passive silence from
the progressive left in America on this. I think that
diagnosing that problem is really, really key. I was with
Heather McGee a few weeks.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Ago, the author of the Some of Us author.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Beautiful thank you for the pro Yes, Yeah, and her
diagnosis was, you know, the progressive movement, especially among young people,
are really hesitant to throw Biden a bone because they
were hoping for a different kind of candidate, different kind
of policy. But in their silence, you know, all lawmakers
(34:03):
learn that they can spend a ton of political capital,
do all this good, and get not a lot of
returns from it, you know, in terms of political success,
And so poor families in the future are going to
pay for our silence.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
And you know what's interesting on that point, Matt, I
have I have two I have one different opinion in
one to add to this failure of blaring the good
news of what happened with the COVID stimulus money and
its impact on lower and poverty. One is that I
actually think that the problem of inflation became an economic
(34:44):
political problem for the Democrats. And rather than saying young progressives,
who frankly don't think drive much news coverage, particularly in
the page of the New York Times of the Washington Post,
what does drive a lot of news coverage is median voters,
Democrats in particular, since Republican Party has gone all crazy
and so that's you know, it's a different kind of voter.
(35:06):
And for those median Democratic voters, not only is inflation real,
meaning their cost were driven up, but this question of
whether or not we need to get back to something
that was, like you know, Obama friendly, an economy that
worked then before Donald Trump and before all this COVID madness,
and in some ways inflation became the bugaboo of the
(35:28):
success of the stimulus package, whether or not we can
actually absorb inflation or not, which is a policy debate
separate from this. I think that's what went wrong. That
political liability and risk to what carrying the water for
inflation during this moment, I think contributed to the lack
of like celebrating the stimulus packages and Khalid.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
That's inherent to the democratic message. What you just said
that if you think of Biden or Obama, they're always
speaking to the middle class, right, and inflation is a
middle class problem. They don't want to speak about poor people.
They don't say these tax cuts will benefit the poor.
And when you talk like that for thirty years, you know,
(36:12):
then then an issue like this comes up, a success story,
and you can't own it because they haven't. They don't
have that language. They're gonna always focus on the middle class.
And it's like it's like they shot themselves in the
foot as they're as they're doing this.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
I think that you're right that that that narrative shifted.
I think that's that's a huge part of it. You
had a second point too.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second point which gets me also
to a kind of term you adopt. So the second
point is that I think we live in a country
where everyone is socialized to despise poor people, including poor
people that they the politics of on deserving, this of individualism,
(36:57):
of meritocracy, of what we used to call social Darwinism,
which is a version of basically saying, you know, if
you're poor, you you deserve to be poor because you're
not good enough to either biologically, culturally fill in the blank.
And I think that spirit is alive and well in America.
I think it has been cultivated since Reagan took office
(37:18):
after the nineteen sixties, which was an exceptional period for
redefining our values, even if we didn't fully get there.
And I will say, in my own social networks, and
I'm not going to name any names, I heard more
than a few stories of people saying, yeah, you know,
look at those poor people getting those checks and look
at what they're doing with that money. Whether it was
(37:41):
true or not, it didn't matter. What mattered is that
poor people are not to be trusted, they're not good people,
and we should we shouldn't encourage the dependency that comes
with it. These are all things that every American listening
to me right now knows fully well. But being honest
(38:02):
about the scale of that sentiment, that ideology that exists
in our society. I think is a problem that your
book tries to address by giving a new term, at
least to yourself, this notion of a poverty abolitionist, this
idea that listen, we actually have to commit ourselves to
ending poverty and it's not going to be solved by
(38:22):
fixing poor people.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Right. There's this line in the book by Tommy ORNs,
the novelist that I just love, where he says, these
kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings,
falling to their deaths, and we think that the problem
is that they're jumping, and we have to find ways
of telling the story about the fire. You know, who
lit it, who's warming their hands by it. And I
(38:46):
think we have to have this reflex where every time
someone goes down that road, or goes down the scarcity
mindset road, the idea that we can't afford to do more.
I think we just have to have this narrative, rhetorical
reflex we're pushing back constantly, and for me, the idea
of a poverty abolitionism is a conviction, a commitment that
(39:08):
shares with other abolitionist movements, the belief that poverty is
an abomination. It's not something we have to live with.
It's not something that we should want to reduce, it's
something we should want to end. And I think that
it shares with other abolitionist movements, like the movement to
abolished lavery of the prison, the recognition that profiting from
(39:28):
someone else's paying corrupts all of us. And I think
that when we take this on as an identity, it
becomes personal and political. It means shopping differently, investing differently,
living differently, flexing our influence and wherever we have it
in the spirit of divesting from poverty. And I think
that this is kind of how we change the common sense.
(39:52):
But we all have to have some skin in the game,
I think, and not just keep kicking the can down
the road and putting it on whoever that uncle that
comes to Thanksgiving, or that one relative or the guy
down the hall or the other political party, that start
really taking some ownership over this in our own lives.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
You use this term by Seawright Mills along the way
that you call that he coined, and you use here
structural immorality that fundamentally we have a society that was
built on immoral premises. You know, we don't have to
go down the road of the indigenous land that was
stolen or the enslaved bodies, but that the ongoing way
(40:33):
in which freedom in America also means the freedom to exploit,
to take as much as possible, and then to blame
people for their own misery as a result of that process.
You even use the term at some point you're like,
if this isn't gas lighting, I don't know what it is, right.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Right, And a lot of us just just trying to
live find ourselves morally compromised traditions and relationships, right, And
so I think that I love this term structural immorality
because it recognizes that, like, look, you know, this is
hard for all of us. We're all kind of hard
in us. But we can start investing day by day.
And so I think that finding ways to personalize this,
(41:10):
I feel like it's important for building that political will.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
Listen, you make really clear here in this book that
the cost of solving poverty, of ending poverty, of abolishing
poverty means that we all have to bear some cost
for doing that, and all of this bs in our
talking points that we hear in the public policy debate.
(41:35):
We all win with equity, we all win. Everybody can
be rich is bullshit. It is bullshit. In order for
the people living in East Hoorn next to me, which
is on average a more working class community than the
affluence South Orange that I live in, either my taxes
are going to have to go up to help subsidize
their needs, or the price of my home is going
(41:58):
to have to come down so that more of them
can afford to live in this community, either through single
family units or affordable housing. Either way, something has to change,
and I'm going to have to give up something in
order for that change to happen. I just want to
end this conversation with that recognition, because we cannot keep
(42:18):
believing that solving for an economic system built for exploitation
means that we can all be good people and bear
no burden or cost for change.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Right. I think that those of us that have found
economic security and privilege will have to take less from
the government. We will have to start benefiting less from
government largess. But what we get from that bargain is
a better country. We get a safer country, we get
a healthier country, we get a freer country. We get
(42:49):
a country where we don't have to worry about our
kids so much. We get a country that lives up
to its stated values and its higher his highest angels,
you know, in highest values. So I think that you're right.
It is a lie to swallow these everyone and wins arguments.
But I do think that there are costs that we're
(43:13):
bearing now as a country by tolerating all this desperation
and depravity around us. And there's going to be cost
to unwinding ourselves from the addiction of poverty. But those
are the costs that I'm totally willing to bear. I
want to live in that country.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Matt. You are so intelligent, and you're also so thoughtful
and caring. I mean, it's a thing that I think
is in It's rare and amazing, and it comes through
in your writing and it obviously comes through and speaking
with you.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
So thank you well your work and Khalil's your work
has meant so much to me over the years, and
your friendship and collegialship, and thank you so much for
everything you do out in the world. So it's been
a real honor, you know, just to be in conversation
with you all, and I hope we can do it
in person soon.
Speaker 2 (43:59):
Thanks so much Matt for joining us today on some
of our best friends are thanks us. What a good conversation.
I learned a lot man. But you know, Ben, something
that really struck me talking to him when he said
that a mobile home park owner makes four hundred thousand
(44:21):
dollars profit off of backs of poor people in Milwaukee, Like,
I was like, damn, that's that's a lot of bread
and it. You know, we often like think that people
who are renting these places are doing like public service,
you know, to some degree, because these are really shitty places,
whether it's a mobile home park or some slumlord in
(44:42):
the Bronx. But no, what he's really saying is that
they are holding the line on their costs to create
decent places of living so that they can make as
much money as possible off the poorest people.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean this is the work that I've
done on housing too, and why we need government in
these roles because the private market is never going to
deliver this fairly. Yeah, that's what we learn over and
over and over again.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah. And then government with like direct cash assistance, you know,
you end up with twenty two cents in the pocket
of poor person and the rich people are getting mortgage deductions.
It is so much so yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, I mean so for me and all of that.
Then hearing him talk about poverty abolition, which is not
something I had heard about before this book and before
this conversation, is like, I like that. It makes me
think about it in terms of prison abolition and about
mass incarceration, because when I think about mass incarceration, I
think about these fifty years and that we're living in
(45:37):
this status quo which is is not normal. It's an aberrations,
it's punishing, and we can't accept it as normal. And
that's what I think poverty abolition does too. Like the
way we're living now, we can't accept this, you know,
the air we're breathing, and so it is that kind
of call to action. It is involves all of us,
(46:00):
and so yeah, I think that phrase should be used more.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, you just said something that
I hadn't thought about when we talked to Matt. But
it just echoes your point really clearly. The fact of
mass incarceration, as a lot of prison abolitionists will say,
is a consequence of the way that poor people were
abandoned by the state. Yea connected they're connected. Yeah, so
(46:24):
it's the right approach to solving both problems. So we
got work to do. I don't know about you, but
I'm on it. I am on it. First responder poverty, abolitionism,
signing me up, love you, Love you too. Some of
(46:45):
My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries.
The show is written and hosted by me Khalil Dubron
Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang.
It's edited by Sarah Nicks with help from Keishel Williams.
Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our managing producer
is Constanza Guyardot.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Pushkin thanks to Leital Mollad, Julia Barton, Heather Fain, Carly Migliori,
John schnarz Retta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website Averyaryong
dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot Fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen. Even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it.
Speaker 4 (47:55):
Thank you, it's so good to see you both wished
the podcast for like eight hours long.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
I like that our editors would hate that.
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