A big part of why this is happening isn't just because the donor class is scared of class war (though I'm sure that's partially true), but the fact is that many educated, middle-class urban/suburban whites hate poor white people, especially Southerners. They are comfortable with race-based anti-poverty not because they're really opposed to poverty, but because they do not see minorities as the Enemy in the way that they see poor whites as the Enemy. To them, people like my family are detestable, without class or culture, etc. I remember forcing myself to lose my "country" accent when I went to college in the Big City because I kept getting weird looks or people being surprised I wasn't homophobic etc. This has only gotten worse in the post-Trump era.
> If activists sincerely can’t get themselves excited about a broad political push against poverty per se and see the moral force in that, then I think that just reflects poorly on them
Lol Matt. The activists do not care about poor people. Nobody cares about poor people, that's why this problem exists in the first place. The activists care about Twitter likes and clout within their social group.
Poverty is a real and important problem in the U.S. But "Less than half the median income" sounds like the a measure of inequality, not of poverty, to me. If the median income in today's dollars were $250k/year, then people with income 45% of the median would not be living in poverty.
Doing my MPP research for me again! Thank you Matt!! That Garfinkle paper takes at least an hour out of my research time this weekend. Shame on me for every time I’ve grumbled about paying 8 bucks for one writer’s subscription.
Not to contest the basic virtue of a child tax credit, but looking at Milan's chart and the eye-popping cost/benefit conclusion, surely the $900 billion of benefits represented by increased future earnings of today's children, health and longevity benefits to today's children and reduced crime aren't 'benefits per year' the way chart says, but the discounted present value of these benefits for a cohort of children over their lifetimes, assuming the CTC was paid for X years during their childhood. This is surely more than one year of benefits. By comparing the one-year cost against a lifetime of benefits you aren't capturing the true apples-to-apples cost and benefits by labeling them as costs and benefits 'per year'. Another minor point, the UAE, Norway and Switzerland all have higher median incomes than the US, according to my Google search.
I think Matt overlooks ( perhaps just to avoid complicating the article) the degree to which most of the nations which perform much better than us on these metrics also use other policy levers in support of stable and reasonably well-compensated employment for low-to-mid-skilled workers.
The Nordics and Germany all have effective measures to support manufacturing and mid-value-added employment, meaning their transfer states have an easier lift than would otherwise be the case.
“This is a group that voted for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Donald Trump”
I feel like this is an important reason racial targeting has taken over. There is a collective sense that poor whites, in voting for Trump, surrendered any claim to assistance through racially-motivated voting.
I think that’s fed the current zeitgeist in two ways: it’s reduced the moral weight of poor whites and made explicit racial targeting emotionally satisfying.
(For the record, I had this same opinion despite its obvious tension with my belief that the sort of precarity faced by poor whites is bad for democracy.)
I think an underrated aspect of this is that the democratic donor class / elites / etc don't see white poverty in their daily lives, so it's easy for them to discount its size and breadth.
The democratic power bases are in big coastal cities where race and poverty correlate fairly neatly, or they grew up in wealthy, white suburbs that surround a poorer, less white urban area. For them, wealth and whiteness go hand in hand. Rural poverty like Appalachia or California's central valley is merely an abstract idea, because the power base doesn't have any stakes there.
I honestly can't remember EVER hearing about white urban poverty in any part of the discourse. I'm sure most power brokers could tell you about poverty in west Baltimore (they watched The Wire!), but there's a zero percent chance they know Armistead Gardens or Pigtown or Brooklyn (in Baltimore, not NYC)., let alone largely white cities with a lot of poverty like Topeka or Huntington. I'm always amazed at the complete erasure of poor urban whites in any discourse about American cities.
Not only does this discount the experiences of millions of poor whites, but I don't see how its helpful to frame poverty only as an issue that affects non-whites. If anything, it feels like this plays into strengthening the current white nationalism strain in MAGA land.
I think there’s something to the fact that the kind of white men who end up progressives often have a kind of visceral fear of working class and poor whites that is hard to build empathy.
The long shadow of bullying and harassment makes it hard to feel any sense of common purpose with a lot of people. When I see Trump rallies I don’t feel political disagreement I feel personally, physically threatened and want distance and guns as much as votes.
I feel the same way about white people getting shot by the police. Black people getting shot by the police is a bigger problem, but way too many people of all colors get shot by the police and it would be ethically and coalitionally better to acknowledge this.
“ I do suspect that the wealthy donor class genuinely does find King-style rhetoric about class struggle off-putting and prefers to think of things in narrow racial terms.” It’s always been the case that the wealthy, as a class, are economically right-wing and oppose significant redistributive measures towards a more equal society in the class sense, I.e. what used to be known as a left-wing policy. The left, where successful, never relied on these people as it’s base, but rather on labor unions, in coalition with other groups from the middle class and the poor. The wealthy, by and large, support neoliberals and conservatives. So long as the Democratic Party continues in its trajectory of becoming the new party of “the wealthy donor class” it will become structurally unable, and increasingly unwilling to address fundamental economic issues (healthcare, housing, taxation, cost of education etc) instead probably doubling down on the “woke” kool-aid which from a Marxist perspective is little more than a device to drive a wedge within the working class and keep them all down.
I drew a rebuke from Milan when I raised this point a few weeks ago so I will try to reframe it.
An anti poverty program should have carrots and sticks to encourage young people to focus on education and employment before starting families.
It’s not your fault if you were born poor, but if you repeat the mistakes of your parents then you do bear some responsibility for the poverty of your own children.
A big part of why this is happening isn't just because the donor class is scared of class war (though I'm sure that's partially true), but the fact is that many educated, middle-class urban/suburban whites hate poor white people, especially Southerners. They are comfortable with race-based anti-poverty not because they're really opposed to poverty, but because they do not see minorities as the Enemy in the way that they see poor whites as the Enemy. To them, people like my family are detestable, without class or culture, etc. I remember forcing myself to lose my "country" accent when I went to college in the Big City because I kept getting weird looks or people being surprised I wasn't homophobic etc. This has only gotten worse in the post-Trump era.
But first, I'd just like to congratulate myself on having sat out yesterday's comments section.
> If activists sincerely can’t get themselves excited about a broad political push against poverty per se and see the moral force in that, then I think that just reflects poorly on them
Lol Matt. The activists do not care about poor people. Nobody cares about poor people, that's why this problem exists in the first place. The activists care about Twitter likes and clout within their social group.
Poverty is a real and important problem in the U.S. But "Less than half the median income" sounds like the a measure of inequality, not of poverty, to me. If the median income in today's dollars were $250k/year, then people with income 45% of the median would not be living in poverty.
Minor typo in the first chart ("adulty") now fixed. Sorry about that.
Doing my MPP research for me again! Thank you Matt!! That Garfinkle paper takes at least an hour out of my research time this weekend. Shame on me for every time I’ve grumbled about paying 8 bucks for one writer’s subscription.
Not to contest the basic virtue of a child tax credit, but looking at Milan's chart and the eye-popping cost/benefit conclusion, surely the $900 billion of benefits represented by increased future earnings of today's children, health and longevity benefits to today's children and reduced crime aren't 'benefits per year' the way chart says, but the discounted present value of these benefits for a cohort of children over their lifetimes, assuming the CTC was paid for X years during their childhood. This is surely more than one year of benefits. By comparing the one-year cost against a lifetime of benefits you aren't capturing the true apples-to-apples cost and benefits by labeling them as costs and benefits 'per year'. Another minor point, the UAE, Norway and Switzerland all have higher median incomes than the US, according to my Google search.
Who is.ready to get the comments section locked again.
I think Matt overlooks ( perhaps just to avoid complicating the article) the degree to which most of the nations which perform much better than us on these metrics also use other policy levers in support of stable and reasonably well-compensated employment for low-to-mid-skilled workers.
The Nordics and Germany all have effective measures to support manufacturing and mid-value-added employment, meaning their transfer states have an easier lift than would otherwise be the case.
“This is a group that voted for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Donald Trump”
I feel like this is an important reason racial targeting has taken over. There is a collective sense that poor whites, in voting for Trump, surrendered any claim to assistance through racially-motivated voting.
I think that’s fed the current zeitgeist in two ways: it’s reduced the moral weight of poor whites and made explicit racial targeting emotionally satisfying.
(For the record, I had this same opinion despite its obvious tension with my belief that the sort of precarity faced by poor whites is bad for democracy.)
I think an underrated aspect of this is that the democratic donor class / elites / etc don't see white poverty in their daily lives, so it's easy for them to discount its size and breadth.
The democratic power bases are in big coastal cities where race and poverty correlate fairly neatly, or they grew up in wealthy, white suburbs that surround a poorer, less white urban area. For them, wealth and whiteness go hand in hand. Rural poverty like Appalachia or California's central valley is merely an abstract idea, because the power base doesn't have any stakes there.
I honestly can't remember EVER hearing about white urban poverty in any part of the discourse. I'm sure most power brokers could tell you about poverty in west Baltimore (they watched The Wire!), but there's a zero percent chance they know Armistead Gardens or Pigtown or Brooklyn (in Baltimore, not NYC)., let alone largely white cities with a lot of poverty like Topeka or Huntington. I'm always amazed at the complete erasure of poor urban whites in any discourse about American cities.
Not only does this discount the experiences of millions of poor whites, but I don't see how its helpful to frame poverty only as an issue that affects non-whites. If anything, it feels like this plays into strengthening the current white nationalism strain in MAGA land.
I think there’s something to the fact that the kind of white men who end up progressives often have a kind of visceral fear of working class and poor whites that is hard to build empathy.
The long shadow of bullying and harassment makes it hard to feel any sense of common purpose with a lot of people. When I see Trump rallies I don’t feel political disagreement I feel personally, physically threatened and want distance and guns as much as votes.
To put these poverty numbers in context, one should mention the easiest way to avoid poverty in the First World, follow the success sequence:
1. Finish high school.
2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children.
https://www.econlib.org/the-meaning-of-the-success-sequence/
I feel the same way about white people getting shot by the police. Black people getting shot by the police is a bigger problem, but way too many people of all colors get shot by the police and it would be ethically and coalitionally better to acknowledge this.
“ I do suspect that the wealthy donor class genuinely does find King-style rhetoric about class struggle off-putting and prefers to think of things in narrow racial terms.” It’s always been the case that the wealthy, as a class, are economically right-wing and oppose significant redistributive measures towards a more equal society in the class sense, I.e. what used to be known as a left-wing policy. The left, where successful, never relied on these people as it’s base, but rather on labor unions, in coalition with other groups from the middle class and the poor. The wealthy, by and large, support neoliberals and conservatives. So long as the Democratic Party continues in its trajectory of becoming the new party of “the wealthy donor class” it will become structurally unable, and increasingly unwilling to address fundamental economic issues (healthcare, housing, taxation, cost of education etc) instead probably doubling down on the “woke” kool-aid which from a Marxist perspective is little more than a device to drive a wedge within the working class and keep them all down.
I drew a rebuke from Milan when I raised this point a few weeks ago so I will try to reframe it.
An anti poverty program should have carrots and sticks to encourage young people to focus on education and employment before starting families.
It’s not your fault if you were born poor, but if you repeat the mistakes of your parents then you do bear some responsibility for the poverty of your own children.