The U.S. can make a better world by providing more assistance to people who don’t want to work: The case of Chicago Mayor Lightfoot
The spread of basic income programs is a reminder of the differing views on government held by Democrats and Republicans, urban voters and rural conservatives.
“There’s no indication that I see that the American public thinks what we really need is more aid to people who choose not to work,” said Robert Rector, a conservative public assistance expert at the Heritage Foundation who helped shape the welfare changes of the 1990s.
But in Democratic cities, in states deep blue and bright red, such as Columbia, S.C., Shreveport, La., and Birmingham, Ala., political leaders are moving in the opposite direction. Mayor Lightfoot may be in the throes of a difficult campaign for re-election, but none of her eight rivals for the Democratic mayoral nomination ahead of the first round of voting on Feb. 28 have made an issue of her guaranteed income effort.
Ms. Lightfoot said that the people who didn’t want to expand health care were the same people that were suffering in their communities. These are the same people who are attacking the very core of our democracy by demonizing being different, being the other, based on your religion and who you love, your gender identity.
Adrian Talbott, associate dean for civic engagement at the Crown Family School of Social Work at the University of Chicago, called the effort “a prime example of Democrats’ assertion that government can work.” He added that the expectation was, “with big bets on behalf of traditionally marginalized, vulnerable populations in light of the pandemic, government can meet this moment.”
The income cutoff for Chicago and Cook County is forgiving, 250 percent of the federal poverty level — $36,450 a year for an individual, $75,000 for a family of four — though acceptance was weighted toward certain groups such as homeless people, veterans and caregivers.
In 2021, more than 10% of the US population lived below the federal poverty line. Matthew had stated that the federal poverty line doesn’t depict the full picture of economic insecurity in America.
Despite the daunting statistics, Desmond remains optimistic that the U.S. can make progress in its war on poverty. The labor unions and housing activists are growing movements around the country.
“Most government aid goes to families that need it the least,” Desmond says. If you add up the amount of tax breaks that the government is dedicating to, you can see that we’re doing so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty.
“My hope, too, is in the fact that ending poverty in America is better for all of us,” he says. “It is clearly better for folks that are facing homelessness and hunger and humiliation. It is better for people who have found security diminished and depressed in the midst of poverty. So I do think there’s quite a lot to be hopeful about.”
The poverty rate halved between 1964 and 1974. So the “Great Society” and the war on poverty made an incredible difference. … These interventions helped the families of the poor in America. They made food aid permanent. They expanded Social Security. The war on poverty and the Great Society resulted in many elderly Americans dying penniless. And there was this massive gain in pulling older folks out of poverty. …
I feel that this will give us some hope, because there are people like that who think that government aid doesn’t work. It’s not powerful.” But the Great Society in the war on poverty have this incredibly historical precedent for the good work the government can do.
And it’s also important to realize that when those programs [were] rolled out, Congress looked a lot like Congress does now. It was polarized. It was obstructionary. The Southern Democrats were aligning with Republicans to block progressive reform. And even in that situation — a situation that looks a lot like Washington today — these incredible reforms were passed. So why? And I think the reason is — and this is an idea that I borrowed from Julian Zelizer’s fantastic book, The Fierce Urgency of Now — the reason is grassroots organizers, like the civil rights movement and the labor movements in particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers to move their hand. So I think if we want to confront this problem, I think that our hope lies in the movement.
A lot of us are getting these tax breaks and we don’t see that as a government helping us. We see that as us getting to keep more of what is rightfully ours. And often that leads to a kind of attitude, a political attitude, where we don’t think the government is in our lives. And so those of us who are more apt to take that mortgage interest deduction are also more apt to vote against affordable housing proposals. Those of us who already have employer-sponsored health insurance — which by the way, is government subsidized in a massive way — we’re often apt to vote against the Affordable Care Act. It has this kind of strange political irony in our lives.
I think that’s the most angering thing for me about this conversation is how often we hear how we can’t afford to change something, when we propose to save people’s housing situation or cut child poverty in half. How can we pay for it? And the answer staring us right in the face like we can afford it if many of us took a little less from the government.
When you have a country like ours that has millions of people with a lot of wealth and lots of poor people living next to each other, a system of private and public squalor is locked in.
And it goes a little something like this: If you are a family of means, you have the incentive to rely less and less on the public sector. So we used to want to be free of bosses, but now we want to be free of bus drivers. We don’t want to take the bus. We don’t want to often enroll our kids in the public school system. We don’t need to play in the public park or swim in the public pool. We have our own clubs, our own schools. We have our own cars. And as we withdraw into the private opulence, we have less and less incentive to invest in public services.
I was blown away by this one stat I calculated. So a recent study was published and it showed that if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed, not paid more taxes, … we as a nation could raise an additional $175 billion every year. That is just about enough to pull everyone out of poverty, every parent, every child, every grandparent. We have the resources to do this. It is not hard.
This is a rough estimate. I arrive at this number by looking at everyone under the poverty line, calculating the average it would take to just bring them over the poverty line and adding that all up. It’s comparable to what we could earn if we forced fair taxes at the top of the market. What else could we do with $175 billion? We could more than double our investment in affordable housing. We could reestablish the extended child tax credit that we rolled out during COVID. … [That]was basically a check for middle and low-income families with kids. That’s all it was. A simple intervention reduced child poverty by half in six months. We could bring that back again with $175 billion and still have money left over.
Connecting People to Aid in Application Processes of Food Stamps and Wage Supplements: A NPR.org Interview with Susan Nyakundi and Heidi Saman
A lot of us thought that people weren’t applying for food stamps or applying for wage supplements because they were stigmatized. They were embarrassed, and there is something to that. The weight of the evidence suggests that the reason people don’t access aid is because it’s hard to apply for. Often you have to apply every year again and again, and people often lose their aid just because they couldn’t make the appointment or forgot to reapply.
There are small, tiny interventions that address the problems and help people access aid that they need. For example, if you make the font bigger and clearer and use less words, you can get many more people applying for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Poor families that work are going to benefit from this benefit. If you bring elderly people with someone who will help them with the application process of applying for food stamps, they will become more likely to apply for food stamps as they get older. There are simple interventions that can connect people to aid and should be put in place immediately.
Susan Nyakundi and Heidi Saman produced and edited the audio interview. The NPR.org interview was written by Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth.