Matthew Desmond on America’s Addiction to Poverty
About this episode
Desmond's new book, 'Poverty, by America,' reframes American poverty not as the poor's problem but everyone else's: the affluent benefit from and sustain deprivation. Klein and Desmond discuss how poverty is measured and how pandemic-era programs like the expanded child tax credit cut poverty sharply, proving it is a policy choice. Desmond argues that America subsidizes affluence far more than it relieves poverty: tax breaks, housing subsidies, and exploitative low-wage labor markets reward the comfortable while trapping others, as his story of Julio the landscaper illustrates. He calls for 'poverty abolitionism' — a moral movement making everyone an abolitionist — backed by expanding the child tax credit, universal housing vouchers or public housing, sectoral wage bargaining, and ensuring the top 1% pay owed taxes. Klein probes whether inflation and welfare skepticism block this agenda; Desmond insists exploitation, not dependency, is the deeper story.