The New York Times just loves denouncing the United States for not spending enough money on the poor — all the more so when it uses words like "disgrace" and invidiously claims that our spending is less than other nations.  The latest example of this recurring genre comes from a sociologist at Princeton University, Matthew Desmond, who shows every sign of being a made man, receiving the peak honors bestowed on scholars who effectively reinforce the chosen narrative of the ruling elite:

• Endowed chair at an upper-tier Ivy League university
• Member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard
• Pulitzer Prize
• National Book Award
• Carnegie Medal
• PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
• William Julius Wilson Early Career Award
• And, of course, a MacArthur "Genius" grant

And he received all of these endorsements while being a dreaded white male.

So it comes as no surprise that the denunciation of America is full-throated.  We are the worst, in a class of our own:

America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own

The United States has a poverty problem.

A third of the country's people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they'd have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.

Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.

On the eve of the Covid pandemic, in 2019, our child poverty rate was roughly double that of several peer nations, including Canada, South Korea and Germany. Anyone who has visited these countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay. When abroad, I have on several occasions heard Europeans use the phrase "American-style deprivation."

No doubt, Professor Desmond is a smart fellow.  But I find it strange that government spending is the sole factor explaining why our impoverished class is so large.  There are no behavioral factors considered.  One is poor because the government doesn't give you enough money.  Period.

Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.

All the more so because we clearly have the resources and know-how to effectively end it. The bold relief issued by the federal government during the pandemic — especially expanded child tax credits, unemployment insurance and emergency rental assistance — plunged child poverty and evictions to record lows and powered a swift economic recovery. "I don't think we have ever seen a policy have as much impact as quickly as the child tax credit in 2021," Dorian Warren, a co-president of Community Change, a national organization aimed at empowering low-income people, told me. "In six months — six months — we reduced child poverty almost by half. We know how to do this."

We do — but predictably, some Americans with well-fed and well-housed families complained that the country could no longer afford investing so deeply in its children. At best, this was a breathtaking failure of moral imagination; at worst, it was a selfish, harmful lie.

We could fund powerful antipoverty programs through sensible tax reform and enforcement.

South Korea, which he cites as a peer nation, has a single-parent household rate of 7 percent.  In the USA, about a third of children live in single-parent households, and among Blacks, the rate is 64 percent.  We know that, statistically, waiting to graduate high school, getting a job, and getting married before having children almost guarantees that one will avoid poverty.  Yet this factors not at all into the analysis.  Poor people in the United States have no agency; they can be poor only if the government doesn't give them money.  There is nothing they can do for themselves.

I wonder why.  Maybe that's why he has all those honors!

Photo credit: Steve Depolo, CC BY 3.0 license.