Why do we tolerate this much suffering amid so much wealth?
Why does the richest nation in the world still have so many people living in poverty? One in every nine people in America is officially poor, and one in eight children – why do we tolerate this much suffering amid so much wealth?
A. When I was living in Milwaukee researching my last book, I saw a kind of poverty that I had never seen before. I saw grandmas living without heat in the winter, I spent time with families whose landlords refused to fix their plumbing and so their sewer would back up into the bathroom.
And if you combine all the tax breaks we get with social insurance programs and means-tested programs like food stamps, the top 20% of Americans on average – the average family in that income bracket – gets about $35,000 from the government every year, but families in the bottom 20% only get about $25,000. That’s a 40% difference. So it’s an incredibly lopsided welfare state, where we’re doing a lot more to subsidize affluence than we are to fight poverty.Q.
Or think about labor exploitation. Many of us consume the cheap goods and services the working poor produce. Those of us invested in the stock market often profit when we see our savings going up and up, even when those savings sometimes come at the cost of a human sacrifice, by really tolerating low wages out there. So, I think the book is calling for all of us to kind of examine our lives and recognize how we’re connected to the problem and connected to the solution.
To move those big policies, we need to build a political will, and to do that we need to start taking individual responsibility in our own lives too. And so, I do call for deeper investments in poverty eradication. I do call for a renewing of social movements. But in some ways, I think those things are intimately connected and require all of us to keep pushing from the bottom. That’s what building the political will is.
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