Thanks for reminding us about King's push to ameliorate all poverty stricken people in America, not just black people living in poverty. I agree with King and with your position here, but, just to add context and to make sure that people understand what a heavy lift this effort is, I want to remind everyone that poor white people are not, as a rule, well educated. As a white southerner who grew up poor, I was certainly not well educated. This is important because it is easier and more likely that poor uneducated whites will fall for racist demagogues who seek to divide poor whites from poor non-whites. Trump and his cronies are obviously doing this now. King's message and program is the way to go because he marshaled the power of Christian faith, which can overcome the barrier of a poor education and appeal to every good person's sense of morality and justice, regardless of their wealth or education level or race.
First, US poverty is skewed when shown by "income" which does not include government cash transfers (TANF, SNAP; HUD Vouchers, SSDI, etc.) which, when added to income, show similar household purchasing power with Western Europe.
Second, Europe affords social programming through what progs here call "regressive" taxation. You cant have progressive tax policy (More than 50% of Americans do not pay US Income tax) AND progressive social safety net, especially in a country with high immigration, like the USA.
Third, so-called income inequality (racial or otherwise) exists only in Blue Urban cities. The red states don't have this problem. So, wealthy Urban progs should put their money where their mouth is.
Cue the SF tech zillionaire narrative that the 1% already pay 80% of the US income tax in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.......
I wish politicians would stop trying to rebrand welfare programs and fully drop the idea that in-kind is better than cash. We should have one welfare program, let's call it welfare.gov. Federally funded and administered and it would combine the EITC, CTC, TANF, SNAP, Section 8, LIHEAP, and Unemployment. People would have to do six month reviews to stay on the system and the benefits would scale to the situation. Someone with low income, high rent/utilities, and children would get the most. Someone who doesn't work, no kids, and is homeless would still get something. Base it off of England's Universal Credit program which consolidated all of their welfare programs.
The reason many people believe that in-kind is better than cash is that cash is easy to spend on useless or counterproductive things: alcohol, recreational drugs, etc. Of course, the same can be done with in-kind benefits - it is possible to illegally sell one's EBT card for booze money or whatnot - but it's harder.
If you want all-cash benefits, you have to answer the classic conservative question: "Suppose you give so-and-so a bunch of cash *instead* of food and housing assistance, they spend it all on pot and a week later they're still hungry and homeless and now also cash-less, what do you do next?"
Obviously it’s imperative to eliminate child poverty, and we can afford to even without the projected benefits. But I have to play the opposition for a moment and ask: will we really get all these benefits from cash transfers? Or are we extrapolating from kids whose parents have good market incomes? It is not entirely crazy to suspect that raising successful children and earning well in the labor market could also be related by mechanisms other than money.
I think a lot driving the 'only help the non-white poor' position is a belief that the United States is perfectly meritocratic ASIDE FROM the effects of racism. Thus, poor whites are poor because they deserve to be poor and shouldn't be helped. It's discouraging that such a fundamentally right-wing position came to dominate the thinking on the "left".
Reading that the guaranteed-income program would target residents of the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood in Atlanta was kind of funny to me because that neighborhood is gentrified as fuck. Granted, there is still a significant population of poorer black residents there, and those forces of gentrification likely compound their financial problems, but still it kind of funny seeing that neighborhood used for the purposes of racial justice symbolism when I mostly hear about it in terms of being the hot new neighborhood for young professionals.
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.
For a more concrete example, look at the sneering disdain tastemakers have for Insane Clown Posse, a group that is as close to an avatar for poor whites as popular culture allows. ICP is wildly popular in the white underclass for their depictions of their struggles, and we do nothing but ceaselessly mock them.
I work on child welfare and juvenile justice issues and I was so very much hoping for a permanent CTC -- it feels like the best chance to make a real difference for the most vulnerable young people who really need more adult support and supervision and could get it more easily if their parents had more economic support and security. It's pretty heartbreaking that we didn't get it, and while I would settle for the Romney plan, the loss of TANF in California would hurt the citizen children of undocumented immigrants a lot unless the CTC is structured in a way to ensure that all citizen children can get the credit, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.
“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.)
Bruenig has a pretty good takedown for this, which is that if you get divorced or lose your job, you’re recast as no longer having followed the sequence. The research did not really identify people who followed the steps; it identifies people who are currently in the desired state.
Personally I agree that people should do this. I did, and it's working out great. As a general matter, I think that if you are someone of median work ethic and intelligence and you don't make any major negative life choices, you have a great chance of doing well in America. Probably better than anywhere else in the world.
True - but upper middle class is overrated. As someone who went from bottom to the top, I've had the most fun at the bottom. The upper middle class works too damn hard. Nobody tells you that until your stuck in that rat race.
I know most people here really dislike Sen. Manchin for essentially killing the monthly child allowance, but I have to ask, how many of you have actually been to West Virginia? I'm from Ohio and have been to WV quite a bit, and also honestly, southern Ohio is not *that* different from WV. Manchin knows his constituents; not just want they want but how they live, and I think he actually fears what will happen to them if they are given a permanent child allowance. He is concerned that with a child allowance a lot of young people will completely drop out of the workforce. Now don't get me wrong, I support a child allowance, because it is better than the alternatives (and I think Sen. Romney's plan for one is far and above the best one), but it took me a long to come support it, mainly because of the same concerns Manchin has. I don't think anyone, including Romney, has really thought about the unintended consequences of giving younger adults a lot of free money. Now, it is more likely that younger adults will drop out of the workforce in rural areas than in urban areas due to the cost of living (maybe this is a good reason to vary the child allowance by county), but the US has never really dealt with a large population of young unemployed people in a way that countries such as Spain or Greece have (note that things are not the best in those countries). Arthur Brooks is correct about earned success: it is a good thing for people to achieve. If a permanent child allowance is to become reality, we need to be ready to face all the consequences.
Is anybody really going to drop out of the workforce simply because the government is giving them a couple hundred bucks per month? You can't live on that, even as an individual, let alone support a family.
This is assuming just one child though. If someone has 2 or more kids that's close to $1000/month or more under any child allowance plan I have seen. Combined with other cash payments such as SSID or food stamps, with the addition of an inherited house or vehicle (which is probably more common among rural poor than urban poor), and it could be feasible.
Even if you have 2 or more kids, yes, you get more money, but you need more money because your expenses are up. Even if it is theoretically possible to drop out of the workforce and not have your kids starve to death, it will not be a comfortable life, and your standard of living will be higher remaining in the workforce.
Where incentives become a problem is when you have these arbitrary thresholds where if your income is $1 over the threshold, the incentive immediately disappears. Or, if you work, the incentive disappears. Universal payments avoid this problem, since taking a job that pays $X/month still increases your net income by $X/month. Unfortunately, universal payments are also much more expensive, which is why real-world anti-poverty programs unusally end up with these arbitrary thresholds.
This seems like a line of reasoning that's trying to have it both ways. If the credit is meaningful enough to swing behavior, it could swing it in either positive ways, negative ways, or both. But if it's not enough money to matter, then it won't do much of anything positive or negative.
I'm likely not reading something properly here, but how does it follow that a child allowance would lead to youth dropping out of the workforce? I could see that for a UBI, and indeed that's one of my hesitations about a UBI. Is the idea that more young people will be incentivized to become parents earlier and then peace out from the workforce?
Not youth as in high school or college students, but younger adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And possibly yes to your second question. Another concern is what will children learn when they see their parents stop working.
Wonder what the EAs think about GiveDirectly adding a domestic plank alongside their foreign plank.
As for the question on how to address this issue, after going back and forth in my mind on several ideas, I finally settled on the EITC on the structure I'd prefer, and ramp it up as appropriate. The CTC is in that vein and addresses a big chunk of that ramping up, and certainly any EITC should explicitly account for children & other dependents in a household, but there's also more than just child poverty to address.
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.
Thanks for reminding us about King's push to ameliorate all poverty stricken people in America, not just black people living in poverty. I agree with King and with your position here, but, just to add context and to make sure that people understand what a heavy lift this effort is, I want to remind everyone that poor white people are not, as a rule, well educated. As a white southerner who grew up poor, I was certainly not well educated. This is important because it is easier and more likely that poor uneducated whites will fall for racist demagogues who seek to divide poor whites from poor non-whites. Trump and his cronies are obviously doing this now. King's message and program is the way to go because he marshaled the power of Christian faith, which can overcome the barrier of a poor education and appeal to every good person's sense of morality and justice, regardless of their wealth or education level or race.
First, US poverty is skewed when shown by "income" which does not include government cash transfers (TANF, SNAP; HUD Vouchers, SSDI, etc.) which, when added to income, show similar household purchasing power with Western Europe.
Second, Europe affords social programming through what progs here call "regressive" taxation. You cant have progressive tax policy (More than 50% of Americans do not pay US Income tax) AND progressive social safety net, especially in a country with high immigration, like the USA.
Third, so-called income inequality (racial or otherwise) exists only in Blue Urban cities. The red states don't have this problem. So, wealthy Urban progs should put their money where their mouth is.
Cue the SF tech zillionaire narrative that the 1% already pay 80% of the US income tax in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.......
I wish politicians would stop trying to rebrand welfare programs and fully drop the idea that in-kind is better than cash. We should have one welfare program, let's call it welfare.gov. Federally funded and administered and it would combine the EITC, CTC, TANF, SNAP, Section 8, LIHEAP, and Unemployment. People would have to do six month reviews to stay on the system and the benefits would scale to the situation. Someone with low income, high rent/utilities, and children would get the most. Someone who doesn't work, no kids, and is homeless would still get something. Base it off of England's Universal Credit program which consolidated all of their welfare programs.
The reason many people believe that in-kind is better than cash is that cash is easy to spend on useless or counterproductive things: alcohol, recreational drugs, etc. Of course, the same can be done with in-kind benefits - it is possible to illegally sell one's EBT card for booze money or whatnot - but it's harder.
If you want all-cash benefits, you have to answer the classic conservative question: "Suppose you give so-and-so a bunch of cash *instead* of food and housing assistance, they spend it all on pot and a week later they're still hungry and homeless and now also cash-less, what do you do next?"
Obviously it’s imperative to eliminate child poverty, and we can afford to even without the projected benefits. But I have to play the opposition for a moment and ask: will we really get all these benefits from cash transfers? Or are we extrapolating from kids whose parents have good market incomes? It is not entirely crazy to suspect that raising successful children and earning well in the labor market could also be related by mechanisms other than money.
I think a lot driving the 'only help the non-white poor' position is a belief that the United States is perfectly meritocratic ASIDE FROM the effects of racism. Thus, poor whites are poor because they deserve to be poor and shouldn't be helped. It's discouraging that such a fundamentally right-wing position came to dominate the thinking on the "left".
No kidding a great idea. Cool link to Matt’s grandfather. Love to see corrected chart plus insights on how to achieve politically.
I am pretty sure that link that Matt sent us to is average household income, not median. That's what it says in fact.
In the United States, the *average* household net adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 51 147 a year...
Median incomes are still higher in the United States, but not as much higher.
Reading that the guaranteed-income program would target residents of the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood in Atlanta was kind of funny to me because that neighborhood is gentrified as fuck. Granted, there is still a significant population of poorer black residents there, and those forces of gentrification likely compound their financial problems, but still it kind of funny seeing that neighborhood used for the purposes of racial justice symbolism when I mostly hear about it in terms of being the hot new neighborhood for young professionals.
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.
For a more concrete example, look at the sneering disdain tastemakers have for Insane Clown Posse, a group that is as close to an avatar for poor whites as popular culture allows. ICP is wildly popular in the white underclass for their depictions of their struggles, and we do nothing but ceaselessly mock them.
I work on child welfare and juvenile justice issues and I was so very much hoping for a permanent CTC -- it feels like the best chance to make a real difference for the most vulnerable young people who really need more adult support and supervision and could get it more easily if their parents had more economic support and security. It's pretty heartbreaking that we didn't get it, and while I would settle for the Romney plan, the loss of TANF in California would hurt the citizen children of undocumented immigrants a lot unless the CTC is structured in a way to ensure that all citizen children can get the credit, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.
“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.)
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/
Bruenig has a pretty good takedown for this, which is that if you get divorced or lose your job, you’re recast as no longer having followed the sequence. The research did not really identify people who followed the steps; it identifies people who are currently in the desired state.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/03/01/the-success-sequence-has-found-its-latest-mark/
Personally I agree that people should do this. I did, and it's working out great. As a general matter, I think that if you are someone of median work ethic and intelligence and you don't make any major negative life choices, you have a great chance of doing well in America. Probably better than anywhere else in the world.
But (IMO) Matt Bruenig offers some pretty compelling refutations of the success sequence stuff. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/03/01/the-success-sequence-has-found-its-latest-mark/ Might be valuable context for someone who is new to the subject (not that I'm suggesting you are!).
If you want to be upper middle class, I'd recommend this success sequence:
1. go to the best college you can attend for free (or close to free)
2. major in STEM, accounting, finance, or economics
3. get a job in a growing sun belt city like Dallas or Atlanta and try to buy a house there
True - but upper middle class is overrated. As someone who went from bottom to the top, I've had the most fun at the bottom. The upper middle class works too damn hard. Nobody tells you that until your stuck in that rat race.
One of my favorite posts...thanks
I know most people here really dislike Sen. Manchin for essentially killing the monthly child allowance, but I have to ask, how many of you have actually been to West Virginia? I'm from Ohio and have been to WV quite a bit, and also honestly, southern Ohio is not *that* different from WV. Manchin knows his constituents; not just want they want but how they live, and I think he actually fears what will happen to them if they are given a permanent child allowance. He is concerned that with a child allowance a lot of young people will completely drop out of the workforce. Now don't get me wrong, I support a child allowance, because it is better than the alternatives (and I think Sen. Romney's plan for one is far and above the best one), but it took me a long to come support it, mainly because of the same concerns Manchin has. I don't think anyone, including Romney, has really thought about the unintended consequences of giving younger adults a lot of free money. Now, it is more likely that younger adults will drop out of the workforce in rural areas than in urban areas due to the cost of living (maybe this is a good reason to vary the child allowance by county), but the US has never really dealt with a large population of young unemployed people in a way that countries such as Spain or Greece have (note that things are not the best in those countries). Arthur Brooks is correct about earned success: it is a good thing for people to achieve. If a permanent child allowance is to become reality, we need to be ready to face all the consequences.
I’ve been to WV many times, it is a beautiful state.
Is anybody really going to drop out of the workforce simply because the government is giving them a couple hundred bucks per month? You can't live on that, even as an individual, let alone support a family.
This is assuming just one child though. If someone has 2 or more kids that's close to $1000/month or more under any child allowance plan I have seen. Combined with other cash payments such as SSID or food stamps, with the addition of an inherited house or vehicle (which is probably more common among rural poor than urban poor), and it could be feasible.
Plus a lot of people make money in various informal and sometimes illegal ways
Even if you have 2 or more kids, yes, you get more money, but you need more money because your expenses are up. Even if it is theoretically possible to drop out of the workforce and not have your kids starve to death, it will not be a comfortable life, and your standard of living will be higher remaining in the workforce.
Where incentives become a problem is when you have these arbitrary thresholds where if your income is $1 over the threshold, the incentive immediately disappears. Or, if you work, the incentive disappears. Universal payments avoid this problem, since taking a job that pays $X/month still increases your net income by $X/month. Unfortunately, universal payments are also much more expensive, which is why real-world anti-poverty programs unusally end up with these arbitrary thresholds.
This seems like a line of reasoning that's trying to have it both ways. If the credit is meaningful enough to swing behavior, it could swing it in either positive ways, negative ways, or both. But if it's not enough money to matter, then it won't do much of anything positive or negative.
I'm likely not reading something properly here, but how does it follow that a child allowance would lead to youth dropping out of the workforce? I could see that for a UBI, and indeed that's one of my hesitations about a UBI. Is the idea that more young people will be incentivized to become parents earlier and then peace out from the workforce?
Not youth as in high school or college students, but younger adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And possibly yes to your second question. Another concern is what will children learn when they see their parents stop working.
Wonder what the EAs think about GiveDirectly adding a domestic plank alongside their foreign plank.
As for the question on how to address this issue, after going back and forth in my mind on several ideas, I finally settled on the EITC on the structure I'd prefer, and ramp it up as appropriate. The CTC is in that vein and addresses a big chunk of that ramping up, and certainly any EITC should explicitly account for children & other dependents in a household, but there's also more than just child poverty to address.
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.