 episode of In The Studio. I'm Lynn Weaver, and our topic today is poverty in America. In our studios we have Sasha Bromsky. Welcome for being here. He is an author, an award-winning author of several important books. And he's also a journalist and a lecturer at Tucie Davis in their writing programs. He grew up in London, he went to Oxford, and then to New York to become a journalist, and now he's here with us. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. We're going to talk. You wrote a fabulous book, The American Way of Poverty, and you spent several years, I believe, researching the book and finding out who these poor people are, a poverty is in America, and listening to their voices. So you are in a very good position to tell me what are the causes of poverty in America? That's a huge question. It is a huge question. You can break it down to the two or three of the major ones. I guess let me start by saying what poverty is not caused by in America. All right. Fair enough. When I was growing up, one of the images I remember seeing on TV was the famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s, and what you saw there was absolute poverty, and it was caused by crop failure, it was caused in the absence of a functioning government, and you saw desolation at its rawest. You don't see that here in America. The poverty you see is not caused by crop failure. It's not caused by famine. It's not caused by the absence of the state. It's caused by the allocation of resources. So what I mean by that is when you think of America in the 21st century, what we have is the richest, most powerful country on earth, one of the richest, most powerful countries in human history, and yet one in six Americans, roughly one in six, about 50 million Americans on any given day live below the government-defined poverty line. Doesn't mean they're starving to death. What it means is they have chronic insecurity. So they don't know how they're going to pay for medicines if they get sick. They don't know how they're going to pay for next month's rent. They don't know what they're going to do if their car breaks down. If they're casual labor or they work at the low end of the economy, they don't know what they're going to do if their hours are cut by five or 10 hours the following week. All of these little things add up to chronic insecurity. And I think that's what poverty is in America. It's chronic gnawing insecurity that impacts the daily lives of men, women, and children all over the country, not just in inner cities, not just in far rural areas, but all over the country you see and you experience that insecurity. And for me, you're right, I did spend several years researching this, it's one of the great narratives of modern America. It's one of the great common centralizing themes of what modern America is. And that's obviously got enormous policy implications and cultural implications and everything else. Yes, well, it's very interesting because you put it in a very nice context. And there is a book that was published in the 60s and it also showed some light on this poverty in the 60s. So we continue to have this problem. And there are other books like, for example, $2 a day and things like that. So I'm sure you have some ideas. What do you think is the principal cause of, if you were to choose, because knowing the causes gives you an indication how you can cure it. It's really hard to give one answer to that because there's so many different byways into poverty. I realize I'm oversimplifying here. If you look at the single biggest trigger for bankruptcy, it's medical bills. It's people who get very, very sick and they either have no insurance or they're underinsured and their copays and their deductibles send them into bankruptcy. So that's one extraordinary cause of poverty. But then a longer lying one, an underlying one, is the wage structure of the country. The fact that we have a $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage and millions of American workers are either at that wage or just a fraction above it. Nobody thinks you can actually live a stable, economically secure life and raise a family on $7.25 an hour. You can't. You're going to be living in chronic insecurity. That is one of the great perpetrators of poverty. It keeps people who are working those jobs poor. It keeps their families poor. It deprives the kids of decent opportunities for looking ahead for their own lives. At every step of the way, it divides society. Now, the consequences of the poverty then create these other institutional after effects. So one of the consequences I've written about in other books, earlier books of mine, is the consequence of mass incarceration. That we have 25% of the world's prisoners live in America. We're a prison state. Well, exactly. In many ways, we've become a state that throws a tremendous part of our national resources into incarceration. And overwhelmingly, it's poor people. Disproportionally, it's African American and Latino. Overwhelmingly, it's people who are undereducated because of circumstance or who have drug addictions or mental illness. And we use the prisons as a way of dealing with the low-income mentally ill as a way of dealing with the low-income drug addicted. And so one of the follow-on there is you lock into place an underclass. Because if you put millions of people through the criminal justice system, they come out even more unemployable than they were when they went in. Of course. And there are no programs to re-insert them. And the result is you have people living on the margins. People outside eligibility for federal assistance for drug treatment, outside eligibility for job training, outside eligibility for public housing, and you see them concentrated on the margins in trailer parks, in inner-city slum communities, and so on. And so when you're asking me what's the sort of single byway into poverty, there are many byways in. And once you're there, there are many social forces that keep you poor or that worsen your poverty. And I was coming to that because, surely, all these facts are well known because of your books and other people's books. So do you think that the government isn't capable of doing anything or we don't have the right business model, if you will? I don't think it's a matter of the business model. I think the business model works very well for the business community. Yes, to their advantage. The business model works very badly for working Americans. Yes. And you see that at the bottom of the economy in particular, that if you are poor in America, you're more likely to live in deep poverty and to stay poor than if you were born into poverty in any other Western democracy. Yes. There's more social mobility in Canada, in Sweden, in France, in Germany, and so on. And I think one of the things that is happening here is that this is a model that works well for politically powerful and economically powerful interests and individuals. It's a model that works extremely well for corporate America. So sorry for interrupting, but this is capitalism at its best, if you like? It's a version of capitalism. All markets involve regulation. Markets can't function without regulation. That goes for whether you're living in America or whether you're living in Russia or whether you're living in Brazil or anywhere else. Markets function depending on how they are regulated. Yes. And we have chosen a model that under-regulates working conditions, for example. We allow employers to pay less than our competitor countries do in other First World democracies. We've created a model that puts the burden on buying health insurance onto employers or individuals rather than making it a function of the state, which it is in other advanced democracies. At every level, it's not a matter of regulation versus the absence regulation. It's a matter of how we regulate and what we regulate and what our priorities are for regulating. Are our priorities to make business as usual as easy as possible? Or are our priorities to make wages livable? And that comes with different sets of implications. And different priorities. Would you say, there was a French philosopher, I can't remember his name, who said if you want to understand a country, understand its memories. Wouldn't you say that it's ingrained in the history of the United States? There's sort of the Italian law. You survive, you swim or sink and drown. Up to an extent. I think what you see in American history is, for various reasons, there has been this idea that if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you will succeed. Yes. It works to a greater or lesser extent depending who you're talking about, when you're talking about, where you're talking about. Obviously, it works differently in large cities than in rural areas. There are different social forces in play, but it's never worked in its entirety. That's right. It's always been a myth that if you just let people go it alone, everybody will benefit. Some will benefit, some won't. Of course. It's the survival. Exactly. We recognize that. At our better moments, we've recognized that we need to get involved, first to even the playing field, to layer it out a bit. Secondly, even with a level playing field, there are going to be some people who just don't make it. At our better moments, we have realized that and we've worked out policy solutions to insulate ourselves from that. That's how we created Social Security. That's right. We recognize that if we didn't have that, we'd have a lot of people in old age in poverty. Yes. We moved a huge amount of national resources and national political energy into a conversation about Social Security and then about Medicare and various other protections for elderly people. During eras of high unemployment in the past, especially the New Deal era, we thought creatively. We realized the market was failing for various reasons. The private market in the 30s couldn't solve the unemployment crisis. Roosevelt's administration got to work looking for solutions. Some of the solutions involve direct public employment. Yes. Some of the solutions involve subsidies for private employers to keep people employed, but we put our energies to work looking for ways to smooth out a market that was causing chaos. Yes. We've done that episodically throughout our history. Today, we're still doing it in some places. In some places. Seattle passed a $15 living wage. That's right. Because it realized that you cannot survive in Seattle with the costs of living in Seattle on $7 or $8 or $9 now. California has also. California is also moving that way. Yes. So it's not that we don't have the ideas about how to change. And it comes back to what you were saying. Why are we not doing it? We have political paralysis in Washington at the federal level. But we haven't. 50 years ago, we didn't have that. Exactly. And so I think what I'd say is there's some really interesting anti-poverty programs and solutions and experiments going on in many, many cities around the country and many, many states. It's not that the political imagination has suddenly dried up. Is that when you get it up to the federal level. Yes. The political mechanisms at the federal level have become so corroded. Yes. And so corrupted by money by Citizens United and all the other things that stack the decks in favor of extremely powerful interests that at the federal level, government is no longer functioning in quite the way it should be on behalf of ordinary people who are struggling to make ends meet. And so the challenge then becomes, how do you recraft a political narrative? Yes. How do you reshape the narrative at a national level so that we can have a conversation that includes those 50 million people who at the moment are sort of essentially either ignored or maligned? Yeah. They're either talked about patronizingly or they're talked about as a sort of criminal element or they're just ignored in the hope that somehow their problems will magically disappear. Yes. Of course they don't. Those problems are deep rooted. They're there by many measures. They're getting worse. Yes. So how do you have a conversation nationally that recognizes the scale of that poverty? You know, it's very interesting. Unfortunately, we're running out of time. It went so quickly, but we have just about. That's because I've been talking too much. But I wanted you to. And it's very, very interesting. I can grasp it a little better. But now just in about a minute or so, I know I'm being very unfair. That's right. If you were running for president now. That's the $64,000 question. What would I do? What would you do? I mean, let's maybe not running for president, but if you had all the power in the world, because running for president doesn't mean anything. No. I think, you know, strangely enough, it's actually less mysterious, the process of what you do around poverty than we've been sort of given to believe it is. There. That's right. The first thing I would do is I would reorient the tax policy of this country. It's deeply, deeply regressive in many aspects at the moment. Terribly unfair. Terribly unfair because we tax capital gains, which is the income which wealthy Americans tend to earn at a far lower level than we tax income. And so what you see in the country is the wealthier you are, the easier it is to create tax burdens that are lower than your fair share. The first thing you do is you rethink the tax structure in a progressive way that brings in large amounts of money from the very wealthiest sliver that has been concentrating wealth and underpaying taxes. Use that money in public works, use it in job training, use it in building affordable housing, and so on. Infrastructure. Infrastructure. All the things we've let collapse. Second thing I do is I would raise the minimum wage. That's an easy fix and there's lots of evidence that it does not result in jobs. It doesn't cost too much and it does not result, if you do it well, in jobs hemorrhaging from the economy. And the third thing I do is I would create true universal healthcare because we have an approximation towards it now through a series of sort of patchwork fixes. It's so complicated. Complicated and it leaves 30 million Americans, even after Obamacare, it leaves 30 million Americans outside the insurance system. So you've got 30 million Americans at unique vulnerability to all of the dangers of illness. And so those are the three things, healthcare, wages, and then rethinking the tax structure. Once you do that you can do a whole bunch of other things with the money from the taxes. Well, I'm afraid we have to leave it there. But thank you so much. This was very enlightening. Sasha Bromsky, thank you for your time. Wonderful author. I hope everybody reads his books inside Obama's brain. That was a fabulous book as well. And thank you all for watching. If you'd like to see this program again, just go to our website, dctv.davismedia.org. And of course, while you're there, you can check out some of our other programs. We have very good topics and outstanding guests. So from all of us here at Davis Media, thank you. You've been watching In the Studio. See you next time.