It comesafter a couple believes they have achieved a level of financial stability.

Poverty, by America

poverty is no equalizer.

Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you

Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse.

poverty is instability.

Poverty is pain, physical pain

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled onincarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes.Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected toevery social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families aredenied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in thehistory of the world.

In 2019, the medianwhite household had a net worth of $188,200, compared with $24,100 forthe median Black household. The average white household headed bysomeone with a high school diploma has more wealth than the averageBlack household headed by someone with a college degree.

scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir call this “the bandwidthtax.” “Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity morethan going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied bypoverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not justdeprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood.

There is no flag forpoor rights, after all.

Misery (misère), the Frenchsociologist Eugène Buret once remarked, “is poverty felt morally.”

Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing.

The criminal-legal system, Weaver has written, “trains people for adistinctive and lesser kind of citizenship.”[16]

The political scientist Vesla Weaverhas shown that those stopped (but not arrested) by the police are less likelyto vote.

Criminal justice agencies levy steep fines and fees on the poor, oftenmaking them pay for their own prosecution and incarceration.

In the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities passed “ugly laws” banning“unsightly beggars” from public places. In the first half of the twentiethcentury, vagrancy and loitering ordinances were used to expel the poor frompark benches and street corners. Today, municipal regulations still allow thepolice to arrest the homeless for being seen in public, criminalizing abjectpoverty.

Itdisappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: Theincarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in afalsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measuresexclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych

Poverty is the loss of liberty.

According to the latest national data, one in eighteenpeople in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level ofscarcity. Take the poverty line and cut it in half: Anything below that isconsidered deep poverty. The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380annually for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year,almost 18 million people in America survived under these conditions. TheUnited States allows a much higher proportion of its children—over 5million of them—to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations.

In the land of the free, you can drop all theway down, joining the ranks of the lumpenproletariat (literally the “raggedproletariat”).

Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow orshrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970.

More than3.6 million eviction filings are taped to doors or handed to occupants in anaverage year in America, which is roughly equivalent to the number offoreclosures initiated at the height of the financial crisis in 2010.

Most renting families below the poverty line now spendat least half of their income on housing, with one in four spending morethan 70 percent on rent and utility costs alone.

the federalgovernment provides housing assistance to only one in four of the familieswho qualify for it.

Thirtymillion Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passageof the Affordable Care Act.[4]

poverty is about money, ofcourse, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

The architect of the Official PovertyMeasure—the poverty line—was a bureaucrat working at the SocialSecurity Administration named Mollie Orshansky.

Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson paid a visit to Appalachia and sat on therough-hewn porch of a jobless sawmill worker surrounded by children withsmall clothes and big teeth.

But itwill also require that each of us, in our own way, become povertyabolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation andrefusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.

how some lives are made small so thatothers may grow.

Are we—wethe secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, thelucky—connected to all this needless suffering?

In 1890, Jacob Riis wrote about “how theother half lives,” documenting the horrid conditions of New York tenementsand photographing filthy children asleep in alleyways.

America’spoverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty thanany other advanced democracy.

How could there be, Iwondered, such bald scarcity amid such waste and opulence?

Dadalways griped that the railroad men in town got paid more than he did. Hecould read ancient Greek, but they had a union.

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH poverty in America?

We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.—LEO TOLSTOY

Poverty, by America Book Club DiscussionQuestions